An entertaining problem

Recently, I was trying to type a capital “Q”¹. Instead of “Q” I kept getting a “T”.

Oh no!

It seemed I had lost the proud letter which is the very beginning of the name of my keyboard layout. You can’t have “QWERTY” without “Q”.

Thankfully, I recalled I was messing with my XKB keyboard config while trying to get a USB Foot Switch working. At one point I was testing to see if my changes to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us were having an effect (they were). So I popped that file open again and saw:

    key <AE11> {	[     minus,	underscore	]	};
    key <AE12> {	[     equal,	plus		]	};

    key <AD01> {	[	  q,	T		]	}; // Oh dear!
    key <AD02> {	[	  w,	W		]	};
    key <AD03> {	[	  e,	E		]	};
    key <AD04> {	[	  r,	R		]	};

I hadn’t reverted my test changes. Also, apparently I don’t use “Q” often, because it took a week or so for me to realise that it still had an incorrect mapping.

Well, the fix is easy enough, just change that “T” to a “Q”…

Shoot!

I can’t type a “Q” to fix not being able to type a “Q”. A lovely sense of being in a silly trap flushed over me. Cool!

After basking in the Great Silly, my fix was to copy and paste the blessed, momentarily unreachable, character from this post ² the Queen Wikipedia page. Thanks Queen.

I’m adding this to my new list - “Small things going wrong in Ubuntu which are more entertaining than stressful.”