Ubuntu – Guake terminal hiding on AltGr – can’t type pipes

guakekeyboard

Today my Guake Terminal started acting up in a way I haven't seen before – every time I press AltGr (which on my Swedish keyboard is the right Alt, right next to Spacebar on the right-hand side) the terminal looses focus and hides. On my Swedish keyboard this is extremely inconvenient, since AltGr is used to type pipes (|)…

I did install some updates which required a restart of my system today, but IIRC that was only Ubuntu Base and nothing else. I don't know for certain if this behavior was present before the update – since the popup came up when I started my system, I didn't do much work before I installed them and rebooted.

I also took a look in the Guake preferences to see if there was anything fishy with the keyboard shortcuts, but AltGr isn't used at all, and all other shortcuts work as expected. AltGr works normally in other context, such as an actual Terminal window (opened e.g. by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T) or typing here in Chromium.

What could have caused this? How do i troubleshoot and/or fix it?

Best Answer

I've found a workaround that actually solves the problem for me, if only temporarily1: restart the window manager. Using Unity, this can be done by running

compiz --replace &

in a terminal.

But be careful!

Compiz spits out an aweful lot of gore in the terminal - the first time I did this I forgot the & and my initial reaction to the gore was Ctrl+C - killing my window manager.

It is (supposedly, I never tried it myself) possible to recover, using tricks like Ctrl+Shift+<number> to get to a TTY terminal, and run

DISPLAY=:0 compiz --replace &

but tread carefully anyway. Save all your stuff before trying this, in case you do something stoopid and need to reboot.

Credits:

I probably wouldn't have figured this out without looking in the bug report which falconer brought to my attention.

1) I haven't had this problem since, though. Touch wood 'n' stuff.

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