You were using KDE it sounds like, and the key sequence you inadvertently hit was "ctrl+alt+esc" which is a -really- old X11 shortcut to killing the task that you click on.
I know KDE still retains that shortcut, it's one you're typically unlikely to accidentally hit, but it can happen! I don't think Unity kept it though. Anyway, if it happens again, just hit "esc" to clear it. I actually use it to kill unresponsive steam games or when Firefox decides to stop behaving like an adult. It doesn't just close the window, it terminates the application, so in the example of Firefox, it'll close every Firefox window you have open. It definitely isn't a clean shutdown, but it's good for when an X application has become entirely unresponsive, but you know your system is still good. Pleasantly, Ronald Bynoe ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Jim Garrison [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 10:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PLUG] Accidental X-windows kill On 9/17/2014 10:07 PM, website reader wrote: > Has anyone ever hit this before? I was trying to build some special script > files for vim, and had to enter a control-v esc character sequence into the > script. I tried twice, got a system activity pop-up window which shows > active jobs (obviously a desk-top shortcut) and I hit esc again (or > control-V or both). > > Suddenly a dead-man skull icon appears, my mouse goes inactive, I cannot > click on any of my X-windows and the skull is the mouse pointer. [snip] The usual way to kill X-Windows is Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but this is normally disabled by default on "modern" systems. You didn't say what distro and window manager (Gnome, KDE, etc) you are using, which might be relevant. Or, you might have found a bug in X :-( It would be very interesting if you can reproduce it and figure out exactly what it takes to crash it. -- Jim Garrison ([email protected]) PGP Keys at http://www.jhmg.net RSA 0x04B73B7F DH 0x70738D88 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
