Windows – Alt+Tab behaves like Alt is sticking (but it is not)

keyboardwindows 7

Sometimes, when I press Alt+Tab and then release, the window select menu stays up until I chose a window with mouse or press Enter. Just like if I wouldn't let Alt key go (but I do). Anyone has an idea why this could be the case?

My keybord is brand new (3 days old). Also I opened screen keyboard and see when Alt/Ctrl/Shift/Win keys are pressed and when they are not. So I'm sure none of those 4 keys are sticking by any mechanical reason.
The behavior is "localy stable". I.e. it works many times in a row. And then (when I forget about it) it behaves normaly many times in a row.
I doesn't it when switching from specific windows. But those specific windows are different each time. I mean when it starts to "stick" it sticks all the time for some windows A,B,C and doesn't stick for D,E,F; then it stop to stick and starts again in a while and now it sticks for A,E,F and doesn't stick for B,C,D.
It behaves in the same way with left and right Alt.
I use SharpKeys to remap control keys. Caps -> Left Ctrl, Left Alt -> Left Ctrl, Left Ctrl -> Left Win, Left Win->Right Alt.
I have sticky-keys disabled.

Best Answer

I have discovered that that happended only when a top window is in foreing keyboard layout (I've tried Greek, Russian, German). When I switched layout of the top window to English I could use AltTab normally.

Then I was able to check if this disappears when I turn off SharpKeys (thanks to @JaredT for the hint). And I've found out that the problem was that my Right Alt on my keyboard is actually Alt Gr. So when I used SharpKeys I actually used AltGr+Tab instead of Alt+Tab. Once I've rebinded to use Left Alt instead of Right everything started to work fine.

So I guess AltGr makes Tab to mean something different when you use layout different from English.

Non XFCE-related stuff

It won't be exactly an answer to your problem, sorry for that, but still should be useful for someone at least. In Gnome it was fixed in recent Ubuntus. By it I mean treating Win not as a modifier key. In the old days, e.g. in Ubuntu 9.04, you had to do following change:

Go to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, under Layouts tab click Layout options... button and in Alt/Win key behavior list choose Meta is mapped to Win keys (or Meta is mapped to Left Win) instead of Default.

What it really does? Changes altwin option in $HOME/.gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd/%gconf.xml file (or creates it if it does not exist):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
        <entry name="options" mtime="1298496603" type="list" ltype="string">
                <li type="string">
                        <stringvalue>altwin     altwin:meta_win</stringvalue>
                </li>
        </entry>
</gconf>

If you've chosen Left Win, then there will be following string value:

altwin     altwin:left_meta_win

In Ubuntu 10.10 it's not needed as Default apparently has changed.

But you have XFCE, not Gnome, so this rather won't help you.

XFCE-related stuff

I've downloaded Xubuntu (9.10), played with it a bit and finally found a solution.

Firstly, though, I must say that keyboard settings are really screwed in XFCE. In Settings -> Keyboard under Layout tab you don't have too many options. You cannot change XkbOptions there and even if you do it manually in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/keyboard-layout.xml, it will be overwritten. So I've changed /etc/default/console-setup by adding altwin:meta_win to XKBOPTIONS (use comma as separator if there are some other option(s) already). Still, no luck.

tl;dr

What's the solution?

Do not care about XFCE way of handling keyboard, because it's apparently broken. Use setxkbmap directly:

setxkbmap -option altwin:meta_win

(or left_meta_win, whatever you prefer)

Now you have to check that it really solved your problem. :)

How to apply it permanently?

echo -option altwin:meta_win >>~/.Xkbmap

It can be also done for all users by writing to /etc/X11/Xkbmap instead.

How can I quickly check if `altwin:meta_win` or `altwin:left_meta_win` has been applied?

setxkbmap -print

Line with xkb_symbols should have something like altwin(meta_win).

Windows – Make minimized window move to the end of the alt-tab list

Instead of minimizing, hit Alt-Esc. This will put the window at the bottom of the Z-order.

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