# Useful tips

Reading man pages in &kde;

Pop up the minicli window (&Alt;F2 by default) and type `man:command`. It even unpacks on the fly if the man pages are gzipped.

Or you can use the &kde; Help Center if you are using &kde; 2. Simply start the &kde; Help Center by clicking on the icon (the blue book with the yellow key) on the toolbar. Once the &kde; Help Center 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 Center 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 Center.

What if something is so wrong that I can't 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 can't 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;.