Shift + Backspace Killing Ubuntu

Ever been typing on your computer with an Ubuntu installation and find the screen go black or that you have been logged out, shutting down all your open applications because you forget and hit the backspace key whilst holding down the Shift key? Major pain.

Here’s a solution I have come accross:

Open your terminal and enter the following (ensuring you re-enter the single speech marks (’) as the terminal has a special need where this is concerned):

xmodmap -e ‘keycode 22 = Backspace Backspace Terminate_Server’

You may find that this is not a permanent fix and that the next time you start your machine the problem only returns, meaning you will have to make the ‘Shift + Backspace restart‘ fix again. To overcome this, I simply run the command during startup by following the following steps:

Navigate to System > Preferences > Sessions and click the Startup Programs tab.

Click Add and enter:

xmodmap -e ‘keycode 22 = Backspace Backspace Terminate_Server’