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Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
My web hosting provider offers SSH access that I often use for such things as updating Matomo and Drupal together with more intensive file moving than an FTP session can support. However, I have found in recent months that I no longer can exit cleanly from such sessions using the exit command.
Because this produces a locked terminal session, I was keen to find an alternative to shutting down the terminal application before starting it again. Handily, there is a keyboard shortcut that does just what I need.
It varies a little according to the keyboard that you have. Essentially, it combines the carriage return key with ones for the tilde (~) and period (.) characters. The tilde may need to be produced by the combining the shift and backtick keys on some keyboard layouts but that is not needed on mine. So far, I have found that the <CR>+~+. combination does what I need until SSH sessions start exiting as expected.
There are times when you might need to drop back to a full screen terminal session from a graphical desktop environment when running Linux. One example that I have encountered is the installation of Nvidia’s own graphics drivers on either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Another happened to me on Arch Linux when a Cinnamon desktop environment update left me without the ability to open up a terminal window. Then, the full screen command allowed me to add in an alternative terminal emulator and Tech Drive-in’s list came in handy for this. there might have been something to sort on a FreeBSD installation that needed the same treatment. This latter pair happened to me on sessions running within VirtualBox and that has its own needs when it comes to dropping into a full screen command line session and I will come to that later.
When running Linux on a physical PC, the keyboard shortcuts that you are CTRL + ALT + F1 for entering a full screen terminal session and CTRL + ALT + F7 for returning to the graphical desktop again. When you are running a Linux guest in VirtualBox and the host operating system also is Linux, then the aforementioned shortcuts do not work within the virtual machine but instead affect the host. To get the guest operating system to drop into a full screen terminal session, the keyboard shortcut you need is [Host Key] + F1 and the default host key is the right hand CTRL key on your keyboard unless you have assigned to something else as I have. The exit the full screen terminal session and return to the graphical desktop again, the keyboard shortcut is [Host Key] + F7.
All of this works with GNOME and Cinnamon desktop environments running in X sessions and I cannot vouch for anything else unless alternatives like Wayland come my way. Hopefully, this useful functionality applies to those other set-ups too because there are times when a terminal session is needed to recover from a mishap, rare though those thankfully are and they need to be very rare if not non-existent for most users.