Slackware 14.2
Xfce 4

Hi: Is that delay governed by the DE? In the affirmative case how do I modify it? (If you press a key and hold it down for more than a given time, the corresponding character will be echoed to the screen until you release the key. This I call autorepeat).

Key press repeat delay and speed are controlled in the BIOS and in the DE. For the DE, look in the respective keyboard section of the control center.

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The delay is in milliseconds, the rate (optional) is the number of repeats per second.
For instance:
xset r rate 500 # delay 0.5 second
xset r rate 300 20 # delay 0.5 second rate 10 repeats per second.

To know more: man xset

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Well, thanks a lot Didier. And thanks upnort too. By the way: the control center is a KDE thing. However, runiing Xfce 4 one can run KDE applications. How do I run Control center from Xfce 4?

On almost any Linux system, press Alt+F2 to pen a launcher. Type the name of the file, such as systemsettings.

For pointy-clicky requires some knowledge about XDG standards. Many *.desktop files will show an app menu only in the respective DE or will prevent showing a menu item in certain DE. That limitation can be bypassed by creating a custom *.desktop file.

And what the name of the binary corresponding to Control Center could be?

For KDE, systemsettings. For Xfce, xfce4-settings-manager. For MATE, mate-control-center.

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Thanks a lot!

I have a little laptop which runs 14.2, and back when it was freshly installed the keyboard repeat rate annoyed me. Mostly, this computer does not run a GUI, so I fixed the problem by putting the following code in "/etc/rc.d/rc.local": The "-d 250" is for a 250 millisecond delay, and "-r 24" is the repeat rate in characters/sec. For more information, use "man kbdrate". :-)

When I got around to using the GUI there was no problem which I noticed. I have no idea whether the repeat rate in the GUI changed as a result of running kbdrate.

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By running xfce4-settings-manager I get the same window as Main menu>Applications>Settings>Settings Manager! Not the sofisticated application I have in KDE under ControlCenter.

I'd open a terminal and experiment with xset and my keyboard, then using rc.local or startup settings which ever works for me. that way it is / should basically be system wide set in rc.local, and DT set in a startup file after logging in.

But I miss the lovely control center under KDE!