Control, Shift and R. It was Control, Alt and Delete, which brings up a shutdown prompt
rather than reaching the machine - and no amount of asking will change that.
IT IS A SECURE ATTENTION KEY. Every serious operating system reserves it so that it always
reaches the system and never an application, precisely so a program cannot imitate a login
screen. On Windows an application cannot see it without a kernel driver; on Linux the desktop
takes it. That is not an oversight to work around, it is the same guarantee a reset button
wants being enforced one layer further down, and there is no call this program could make
that would win the argument. It is unavailable for exactly the reason it seemed right.
So the requirement list grew a third item that was not obvious until it bit: the gesture has
to be one the host has no opinion about. Control and Shift with a letter is about as free as
a combination gets - not window management, not a virtual terminal switch, and not a shortcut
any desktop claims by default. It keeps the other two properties: plain F12 and plain Delete
stay free for software, and three keys are not pressed by accident.
If some platform does send a character for it, nothing comes of that either. Whatever arrives
is in memory that is about to be thrown away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
8c6ed62044