# Useful tips

Reading documentation in &kde;

Pop up the Run Command window (&Alt;F2 by default) and type:

- `man:command` for man pages. It even unpacks on the fly if the man pages are gzipped.

- `info:command` for info pages.

- `help:kdeappname` for &kde; application help pages.

You can also enter any of these in the Location text box in &konqueror;.

Or you can use the &kde; Help Centre if you are using &kde; 2. Simply start the &kde; Help Centre by clicking on the icon (the blue book with the yellow key) on the toolbar. Once the &kde; Help Centre has loaded, the window on the left will contain an entry called Unix manual pages. Click once on this entry, and you can browse through all the installed manual pages on your system.

Move or resize windows quickly

To move a window, use &Alt;left mouse button. &Alt;right mouse button will resize the window. Last but not least, &Alt;middle mouse button raises/lowers the window. The &kde; Control Centre allows you to change these mouse bindings.

Killing windows in &kde;

There is a standard keybinding (&Ctrl;&Alt;&Esc;) that gives you a skull & crossbones cursor. Click that cursor on a window to kill it. The keybindings are viewable/changeable from the &kde; Control Centre.

Using this option kills the program forcibly. Data may be lost, and some processes related to the program may remain active. Use only as a last resort.

What if something is so wrong that I ca not even get the skull & crossbones cursor? How do I get out of a total lockup?

These kind of locks tend to occur when an application locks up while it has a so called mouse/keyboard grab. When that happens you can try to select a virtual text console with &Ctrl;&Alt;F1 and login. With the following command you will get a list of all running processes:

            ps -aux | more

By killing the process that has the mousegrab, your desktop will come to life again. Unfortunately you ca not see which process that is, so you will have to find out through trial and error. To kill a process use:

            kill -9 pid

Here pid is the process id of the process, which is the first number on each line reported by `ps` `-aux`.

You can switch back to the desktop with &Ctrl;&Alt;F7 (or F8 through F9 depending on your operating system) to see if things work again. When you press &Alt;Tab you should get a response from the window manager. If not, you need to get back to the text console and try to kill another process.

Good candidates to kill are: the application you were working with, &kicker;, &klipper; and &kdesktop;.