Hello,

Weeks ago, my down key broke. And while it’s given me the great opportunity of learning just a little more VIM, there’s a lot of reasons that I would like it to work again. Here are some details:

1) If in a GUI application I hold the DOWN arrow, the blinking cursor vanishes but doesn’t move anywhere. When I release, the blinking cursor reappears as normal.
2) It was working for a while after the Linux install, then broke suddenly. I’m not aware of what I did to make this change.
3) If I plug in a totally different keyboard of a different model, the down key is still broken.
4) If in, say, a text editor, I hold down shift and hit the down key, it will behave totally normally and highlight a line of text. If I click on a menu item (like “File”) and hit the down key, it will behave totally normally and move the selection down the menu.
5) If, while holding the UP key, I press the DOWN key, it does nothing except to stop the UP key from going up. If, while holding the DOWN key, I press UP, then the cursor does not move. This is, of course, non-standard behavior.
6) I am running Synergy (which allows me to use one keyboard and mouse on two computers via a network), using the Linux machine as the host. The down key is only broken in Linux. Even though the keyboard is plugged into the Linux machine, if I use it in Windows, it works normally. If I stop Synergy, it is still broken, so it's not a problem with synergy.


I ran xev and got the following output when hitting the down key:
FocusIn event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x1900001,
mode NotifyGrab, detail NotifyPointer

KeymapNotify event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

FocusOut event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x1900001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyPointer

FocusIn event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x1900001,
mode NotifyGrab, detail NotifyPointer

KeymapNotify event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

FocusOut event, serial 26, synthetic NO, window 0x1900001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyPointer

Help, anyone?

Thanks,
Joey Stoll

This sounds similar to a problem with my UP key that just started out of the blue a few weeks ago (UP key non-functional but xev showed that it was being pressed), it probably popped up after upgrading some package or another.

My particular solution, in KDE4, was to use the keyboard layout tool and set it for my particular model of keyboard. If the voices in my head are telling the truth, "evdev-managed keyboard" setting would have also worked for me.

I don't know if/how this will translate to your particular desktop/windowing manager of choice, and you may need to do some xorg.conf voodoo to get it working, but the voices in my head are silent concerning that.

Nothing... still nothing. Anyone else have any ideas on this?