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I have Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 installed and every time I press Alt+Left Arrow to go up a directory in my file browser or back a page in my web browser my screen turns all black and there is a terminal cell. Once I press it Alt+Left Arrow again I go to the login screen. Why is this happening and how do I fix this? Any help would be appreciated.

Update: I added an additional tag because it is known to happen in 18.04 too.

Juan Leni
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Andrew Pullins
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  • this soln may help you to understand why this happened, but simple reboot will fix that. link is https://askubuntu.com/questions/893964/altleft-key-locks-the-screen/1060009#1060009 – GD- Ganesh Deshmukh Aug 21 '18 at 18:39

2 Answers2

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There is an open issue about this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1508146

A solution that worked for me was to run:

sudo kbd_mode -s

Juan Leni
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  • Yes this solved it for me. `kbd_mode` reports `Unicode (UTF-8) mode` then `raw (scancode) mdoe` before/after this command. – EoghanM Apr 17 '19 at 15:06
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I just had a problem very close to this one. Without changing any keyboard settings, Alt + ← begun to take me directly to the graphical login screen. Alt + → took me to the full screen terminal login.
After a couple of weeks, Alt + Tab also stopped working. That was too much, and I started to study the problem. I noticed in the keyboard settings that Alt + Tab had been changed to Super + Tab (not by me). When I changed it back, also the Alt + Arrow behavior went back to normal.

kyrofa
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Ari Torhamo
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