[BRLTTY] Space, Enter, Backspace not usable as modifiers

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Devin Prater on 2020/04/10 at 00:03 -0500]

>BRLTTY has always worked very well for me, but this evening, I came to the Pi
>and found that many settings had been set in strange ways; I have no idea how.
>For example, typing was turned off, and screen cursor was set to not be shown,
>and to blink.

Something must've modified brltty's preferences file (which, as Mario has
already said, is usually in /var/lib/brltty/brltty.prefs), or maybe it was even
removed.

>I fixed a lot of those, and restarted the Pi, but found that when I hold Space
>and press P, for example, it just writes “p”. When I press Enter, it makes
>whatever dot 8 would be in computer braille. It is the same with Backspace.
>So, I can’t enter the preferences menu. 

I think you (perhaps accidentally) turned on the Quick Space setting. When on,
pressing space along with the dots for a character types that character
followed by a space. We implemented that feature because some other vendors
have, but it has turned out to be a bit of a trap when there's no non-chord way
to get into the preferences menu to turn it off.

There is, however, a way to turn it off - manually editing the preferences
file. Edit the file /var/lib/brltty/brltty.prefs and look for the line that
says quick-space (it might say braille-quick-space). If it's set to 1 then
change it to 0. If it says yes then change it to no. Then save the file and
restart brltty. And then, of course, don't ever turn it on again. :-)

>I’ve tried deleting the /etc/brltty.conf file, but that didn’t fix it, so I
>touched a new one and hope I didn’t break things further.

that wasn't a good idea. Do you have a saved copy of it somewhere? Do you
remember what customizations you might've made to it?

>Also, the “brltest” command doesn’t seem to be on my system.

That's because it isn't installed.

>So, any ideas? Is there a way to completely reset BRLTTY?

Removing the preferences file, and then restarting brltty.

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