[ale] how to disable CTRL-S ?

hirsch at zapmedia.com hirsch at zapmedia.com
Wed Feb 6 09:24:24 EST 2002


Christopher Bergeron writes:
 > Can I redefine the key combo of CTRL-S?  At work I play in a windows World,
 > yet when I get home to my comfy little pico; I have a bad habit of hitting
 > CTRL-S (windowspeak for Save) instead of CTRL-O and my code bites the dust.
 > Anyone have any tips?

I don't know pico at all, but I'm guessing that this is not really a
pico feature, but a tty feature.  Typically, CTRL-S is the XOFF
signal, i.e. it stops the flow of data.  To restart it use CTRL-Q, the
XON signal.

This is a holdover from software handshaking over slow connections.
It was used over serial lines.  Modems used to use this, and I think
still can.

The good news is that you don't need it any more.  This this in your
.bashrc:

    # turn off XON/XOFF, but only for a tty
    tty > /dev/null && stty -ixon -ixoff


Hope that helps,

--Michael

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