mintwelcome - Launching from terminal crashes on "Ctrl+C"

[Arnaut Billings]

1) Linux Mint 14 - Mate 64-bit
2) Launch mintwelcome from terminal
  1) Highlight Mate 64-bit
  2) Press Ctrl+C
3)
  1) Causes Welcome app to crash.
  2) Fails to copy highlighted text into clipboard.
  3) Outputs the following to the terminal:
    1) ^CTraceback (most recent call last):
             File "/usr/lib/linuxmint/mintWelcome/mintWelcome.py", line 176, in <module>
                   gtk.main()
         KeyboardInterrupt
4)
  1) App not to crash.
  2) Highlighted text to actually be copied to clipboard.

5) Always.

[12318273018273 (bluebuffoon-deactivatedaccount)]

This happens because you launch mintwelcome from the terminal. mintwelcome doesn't accept keyboard input (so note that you can't copy text from mintwelcome anyway!), so the keyboard input stays on your terminal. Pressing Ctrl+C on the terminal makes the shell send an interrupt signal to the running foreground program, which is mintwelcome, telling it to abort. mintwelcome doesn't have a keyboard interrupt handler, so the Python interpreter aborts mintwelcome with the message shown.

That's not a bug; you can abort programs by pressing Ctrl+C on the terminal, so if you launch mintwelcome from the terminal you can abort it with Ctrl+C. That is what you should expect to happen if you press Ctrl+C.

If you don't want Ctrl+C on the terminal to abort programs, then either configure your terminal properly (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, and set Copy to Ctrl+C) or instead of using Ctrl+C use Ctrl+Shift+C to copy (the default keyboard shortcut for that action).

If you need to gather information about your installation, for example to share with others on a problem you are having, instead use the command "inxi -S" on the terminal. The output of inxi -S will include which version, architecture, kernel, and desktop environment of Linux Mint you are running.

[Arnaut Billings (arnaut-billings)]

Hello Vincent,

I don't know if this is the proper forum for having this discussion, if not please point to the correct one.

1) Yes, I'm aware of Ctrl+C and what its interaction with the terminal entails.

2) I routinely launch gui apps from the terminal, and I expect that once the app is launched, that control is transferred to it from the terminal, which in all my years of using linux (close to 11 now), it does. If said app does not support some combination of keyboard shortcuts, or doesn't even have a keyboard interrupt handler, then I expect *nothing* to happen when I use the keyboard, as is my experience with all gui apps I have used in such a manner. For mintwelcome to respond to mouse input on one hand and for it to pass through control to the launching agent on keyboard input on the other hand is quite surprising, and counter-intuitive imho.

If mintwelcome is in focus, then I expect that *none* of my input should be passed through to the launching terminal, regardless of whether the app in focus can handle the input or not. So I have to humbly disagree that is is the correct behavior when the mintwelcome gui is in focus. It sure isn't the way a whole string of other gui apps I have launched from the terminal work.

3) Thanks for the "inxi -S" tip. May be the following text on "Report a bug page" should replaced with your suggestion:

    Report a bug page
    ---------------------
    Linux Mint bug reporting guidelines:

    Please include:

    1) The version and edition of Linux Mint you are using (if you are not sure, open a terminal and run "mintwelcome").