[bug-gtypist] Accidentally hitting the Alt key...

[Chris Jones]

Description: 

Pressing the Alt key accidentally wipes out everything that was typed
and restarts the drill.

As a long-time user of gtypist, this is something I must have noticed
ages ago and never really bothered to investigate.

Here's how to recreate.

Take for instance the following drill:

| can, can, can, cue, cue, cue, can, can, ... etc.
|

While you are reaching for the comma, you may accidentally press the Alt
key pretty much at the same time you are hitting the comma key. 

Now, this is clearly one single typing error and the student should be
penalized in the same way as if he'd hit an 'l', and 'm', or a period
instead of the desired comma...

But what happens is that you get pretty much the same result as if you
had hit the Escape key: everything you typed so far is cleared and the
cursor goes back to the beginning of the drill... or to be precise the
second character of the drill: the first character is marked in error
like so:

| can, can, can, cue, cue, cue, can, can, ... etc.
| ^

.. with the cursor happily blinking in col. 2 as if nothing had
happened..

It took me a while to figure out what my fingers were doing to cause
this--since it was happening randomly and I didn't have a camera handy.

Testing reveals that on two terminals I have looked at (xterm and
gnome-terminal) combinations of the Alt key with just about any other
key (letters, numbers, special characters..) also cause this to happen.

Now where this gets a little annoying and rather confusing is when you
are in the middle of typing a longer text of 10-15 lines targetting 100%
accuracy.. you're on your way to beating your all-time wpm best.. and
BAM... you lose everything..!

I have no idea how this could be handled gracefully in gtypist.. for all
I know, and depending on the way the input key strokes are acquired,
gtypist may not even see the accidental key combo.. but I have taken
a look at other applications running in a terminal (bash, vim, mutt..)
and none appear to demonstrate such behavior.  

So there should be some way to work around this.

As mentioned earlier the problem is perhaps not so much the questionable
behavior in itself.. but rather the fact that it is very disconcerting
for new users of gtypist focusing on their typing who likely have no
idea what is happening. Learning to type is fairly stressful and some
might react with swear words and just decide in anger that the software
is not reliable and switch to something else. 

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature but I thought I might as well
report it just in case. ;-)

CJ

-- 
Have a nice day!