Disabling Terminal Flow Control Keystrokes

If you’ve ever encountered the situation where you’ve accidentally typed the <ctrl-s> keystroke and your terminal seems to ‘hang’, that’s because you’ve typed the ‘XOFF’ special character which tells the terminal not to accept any more key inputs.

The way to restore terminal responsiveness is by typing the <ctrl-q> keystroke (‘XON’) to restore flow control. If you want do disable this feature, use the following command on your shell:

stty -ixon