Hotkeys on selected item such as F2 for Rename occasionally does nothing

[abodedis]

What Happened

Hitting F2 to rename a file/folder occasionally does nothing. This issue may apply to other hotkeys.

Expected Behavior

Hotkeys should always work as expected.

Steps to Reproduce

This is an intermittent issue. The best way to reproduce is to perform a large number of mixed file management operations, such as general navigation, Copy, Paste, Cut, open/close Tabs, switching between Tabs, selecting drives, and of course Rename (F2).

The vast majority (99%) of the time F2 is pressed on a selected item, Files properly allows the user to rename. However, pressing F2 on a selected item occasionally does nothing. Then, pressing F2 a second time will usually work.

The keyboard being used is a relatively new mechanical keyboard with few keystrokes on F2, so for now there is little reason to believe that it is the keyboard.

Other keyboards and systems were used and this issue still appears.

This issue was also present in 5.1.7 Hera.

Logs

Platform Information

OS: elementary OS 6 Odin x86_64 Kernel: 5.11.0-27-generic Packages: 1699 (dpkg), 20 (flatpak) Shell: bash 5.0.17 Resolution: 3840x2160 DE: Pantheon WM: Mutter(Gala) Theme: io.elementary.stylesheet.blueberry [GTK3] Icons: elementary [GTK3] Terminal: io.elementary.t CPU: Intel Xeon W3680 (12) @ 3.326GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 Memory: 1370MiB / 24047MiB

[jeremypw]

Some operations (such rename F2) will only work if there one and only one item selected so make sure that is the case (there could be another item out of view selected). Also, of course, you need the appropriate permissions as well. But there could be a bug whereby Files thinks there is still another rename operation in progress - this will also inhibit renaming.

[abodedis]

Some operations (such rename F2) will only work if there one and only one item selected so make sure that is the case (there could be another item out of view selected). Also, of course, you need the appropriate permissions as well. But there could be a bug whereby Files thinks there is still another rename operation in progress - this will also inhibit renaming.

Thanks for the input. Yes, I am always very careful with this and use rename with only one file selected.

[jeremypw]

If this happens again, try pressing the Esc key - this should cancel any ongoing rename (real or otherwise) and might re-enable the hotkey. Also if this happens check the context menu for the selected item - is the rename item greyed out? If the context item is active then does it work? This will give a clue as to possible causes of this issue.

[abodedis]

I'll try to provide screenshots of this the next time it occurs.

To clarify, once the first press of F2 does nothing, a second press a few seconds later (no mouse clicks or any navigation intervening) will usually work, and the selected file will properly go into rename mode.

Knowing this, maybe the hotkey was never "disabled" in the first place. This behaves as if the first F2 keypress was simply discarded or ignored.

[jeremypw]

There are various other operations, such as initializing or reloading a view that will intentionally "freeze" the view until they are completed - this will also inhibit renaming a file. From your description it sounds like some operation that is taking a significant amount of time has frozen the view until it completes.

[abodedis]

Does Files have, or properly use, a keyboard buffer? You may be on to something.

[jeremypw]

Files just handles key press and release events generated by the Gtk framework. In some circumstances, as mentioned above, it may then choose to ignore them. At the moment it does not put them in a buffer until they can be processed if they cannot be handled immediately.