Suspending with Ctrl-Z freezes all controls, hard reboot required

[ryankhart]

Now, I know this isn't a bug, per se, but more of a lack of user fault tolerance. As a newish Linux user, as I was trying to find a way to make the process run in the background, I hit Ctrl-Z and it suspended the process. Little did I know at the time that meant everything stopped and didn't run in the background. Because everything stopped my keyboard and mouse ceased to function. I had no known way to resume the process or fully quit it, so I held down the power button to force a restart.

Is there a workaround or trick to avoid that if I accidentally do that again in the future? Maybe there's something I can include in the command to help?

I don't know if there is a possible solution based on the way this is currently implemented, but I would have expected that if the process was suspended, all keys go back to their original function. I'm very curious.

Side note: This is an awesome tool. I was fed up with Xmodmap and its complexity. I'm glad I found this.

[Lenbok]

I have done this a couple of times by mistake too. I sshed to the machine from my phone and did kill -9 on the process.

[brandjon]

Funny, I had that happen to me when I typed Ctrl+S in the console, but I still had mouse control so I could kill the process by closing the terminal window.

I suspect the only true way to guard against this would be a separate watchdog process that kills the main one if it becomes unresponsive.

[joshgoebel]

Is there any actual proposal as to how to solve this though in xkeybind itself? Seems it's just kind of a problem with using software that steals/grabs all the inputs and holds them long-term...