Prevent Ctrl+S Freezing Your Terminal

As someone who types a lot of text everyday and am generally quite keen not to lose my work, I tend to hit the key combination [Ctrl]+[S] quite a lot. In fact its almost become muscle memory that every sentence or two I will hit that combination.

When working on a terminal, this can have the unfortunate outcome that the terminal freezes up. For more time than I would like to admit, I thought that this was a Linux bug And found myself frequently restarting terminal sessions that had locked up.

Then I discovered that you can unlock this when it freezes by hitting [Ctrl]+[Q]. However this is a bit of a pain.

I have now discovered a way of turning off this behaviour completely which is a real relief. Simply add the following to your .bashrc file:

#Prevent Ctrl+S Freezing Terminal
stty -ixon

Credit goes to this Stackoverflow post: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12107/how-to-unfreeze-after-accidentally-pressing-ctrl-s-in-a-terminal