Keyboard repeat not working

Question

key repeat is not working at all. wondering what i'm doing wrong, or where the problem is. this is a pretty slim arch install; i installed the xorg group and xmonad, but no desktop (gnome, kde etc) env. other thing that might be an issue is that i pretty much only access this box via vnc and ssh.
i see the the command should be something like
xset r rate 10 1000
but that just returns an error saying xset: unknown option rate
issuing the command xset r and then xset q shows:
Keyboard Control:
  auto repeat:  on
but it still doesn't work.
that said, i haven't actually tried it in any way but via vnc, so maybe vnc is the problem? any suggestions?
thanks in advance!
Last edited by yagmot (2010-06-04 03:32:44)

Answer 1

You are right. According to man xset there is indeed a "rate" agument allowed in certain circumstances (I did never need it, though):
If the server supports the XFree86-Misc extension, or the XKB
extension, then a parameter of 'rate' is accepted and should be
followed by zero, one or two numeric values. The first speci‐
fies the delay before autorepeat starts and the second speci‐
fies the repeat rate. In the case that the server supports the
XKB extension, the delay is the number of milliseconds before
autorepeat starts, and the rate is the number of repeats per
second. If the rate or delay is not given, it will be set to
the default value.
I don't know much about vnc, but this extension stuff could be the cause why it did not work.