So Pd just locked up the keyboard and forced me to reboot because I couldn't type or even use menus in any other application, even after I finally managed to quit pd gracefully.

This does not leave me with a warm fuzzy "looking forward to teaching this software" feeling.

How to prevent this in the future?

Ubuntu Studio 18.04, pd vanilla 0.48.1.

hjh

@ddw_music You seem to be the first person ever to have such a problem.
Was the patch capturing keystrokes, or had Pd hung?
David.

@ddw_music What is the patch you were running when this happened?

Patch is attached. I'm not using any mouse or keyboard state objects and I'm 100% sure there are no infinite loops. I was just trying to replicate a wavetable-crossfade technique that I use a lot in SuperCollider. There's nothing exotic in it.

What happened was... it was late (should have already gone to bed, but anyway...). On my laptop, the PrtSc key is right next to the Ctrl key. I was reaching for Ctrl to move a slider while still in edit mode, but I pressed and held PrtSc instead, and got a lot of screenshot pop-ups. At some point, Esc stopped functioning to dismiss them. So I clicked Cancel on all of them. When I could finally see Pd again, there was a weird error box sticking out from behind a window, whose message was something about "grab failed" (I don't remember the exact wording).

At this point, the OS and all other apps had stopped responding to the keyboard. I thought, OK, Pd is doing something wrong, so I used the mouse to File -> Quit. This seemed to be OK (Pd had definitely not crashed or hung). But the keyboard was still inoperative everywhere else. Mouse clicks were mostly OK, except that clicking on a menu in another app did nothing. Somehow I was able to get to "Restart" in the system menu and do a proper reboot, but at that point, that's the only thing that was working.

Never seen anything like that.

hjh

19-0814-multi-wt.pd

@ddw_music So the "Grab" message is from the OS. There are plenty of posts on the internet for Print Screen problems with Ubuntu (and other Linux variants).
Probably a buggy screenshot package....... maybe #1799059.
I think you can be sure that it had nothing to do with Pd.
David.

@whale-av "So the "Grab" message is from the OS. There are plenty of posts on the internet for Print Screen problems with Ubuntu (and other Linux variants)."

OK, I was confused because it was in a Tcl/Tk window, not a standard OS-styled window.

I guess, just stay away from that key and hope I don't see the behavior again.

Thanks.
hjh