We actually explicitly ignore power button presses while the screen is off for this reason, I believe. I'm not sure if we can ignore other key events without creating edge cases around docked mode, using the volume keys on a system where the backlight has been intentionally reduced to 0%, etc.

I tap the Shift key to turn the display on without producing input, but I don't know how common that is.

I'd hate to have to wait until monitor turns all the way on before I can log in. I can [usually] blindly type my password in just fine.

I don't think you'd need to wait for the monitor to fully synchronize, nor do I think it's even possible to detect this. My suggestion is to discard input while the video output is blanked. You won't have to wait for the monitor to turn on, just for the suspend light to toggle.

If the computer is fully suspended, there is a race condition, since it is unclear early on when the computer is ready to accept input. I am proposing to make this more consistent and recognizable.

omrilio@ thoughts?

I actually LIKE the ability to start typing my password immediately. I agree that losing the keys while we return from suspend is inconsistent tho.

I have a feeling that any change we make here is guaranteed to make people angry.

Ideally, we would also catch keyboard keys while the system is resuming, but I can see how this would be a problem. This will both make it consistent and will work well with the common expectation of key presses never being lost.

Is that something that can be done in a reasonable amount of work?

Sameer probably knows the answer to that or knows of someone who does. :-)

Alternatively, I usually tap spacebar to wake the device/screen. Maybe we could just disregard spaces while the screen is off?

tbuckley@ Would we actually be able to know when the screen fully turned on? Some monitors take a awful long time.

snanda@ are we able to catch keyboard keys while the system is resuming and hold them until it's ready to receive them?

It feels like this bug has morphed into two conflicting requests:

a) Ignore some/all keys while the screen is off.
b) Don't drop key events that wake the system from S3.

If we want to pursue b) (i.e. kernel changes), please file a separate bug for that.

Regarding just disregarding spaces, this isn't unlike the power button behavior I described in #1:

ash/wm/power_button_controller.cc:

 71 void PowerButtonController::OnPowerButtonEvent(
 72     bool down,
 73     const base::TimeTicks& timestamp) {
...
 79   // Avoid starting the lock/shutdown sequence if the power button is pressed
 80   // while the screen is off ( http://crbug.com/128451 ), unless an external
 81   // display is still on (http://crosbug.com/p/24912).
 82   if (brightness_is_zero_ && !internal_display_off_and_external_display_on_)
 83     return;

We could probably use similar logic to determine when we should ignore space key events, although it'd probably need to live in an event handler that swallows the events. We'd need to make sure that they're still reported to powerd as user activity (which may be tricky; issue 599883 is relevant here).

(sorry somehow this bug fell through the cracks and I didn't get a chance to reply earlier)

For c#9 (b), we don't have full control over this.  For example USB keyboards may eat the first few keys when trying to wake the system up.

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Omri, please make a call about what we should do here (if anything). See #9.

I'm going to WontFix this as this given lack of a clear preference even among the small group here. Maybe at some point we can run a UX study if we get additional feedback about this.
(FWIW, I use "Enter" to wake my screen for some reason)