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Sysadmin, Because Even Developers Need Heroes

Some Gnome Key Binding Tips

2008-04-08

A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.04. I’ve been using IceWM for a while and thought I should give Gnome a try. I’m used to Win+Something shortcuts so I wanted to implement those under Gnome. Here is a list of shortcuts that should cover the concepts:

A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.04. I’ve been using IceWM for a while and thought I should give Gnome a try. I’m used to Win+Something shortcuts so I wanted to implement those under Gnome. Here is a list of shortcuts that should cover the concepts:

  • Win+Q: Terminal (With some specific options)
  • Control+Alt+W: Amarok (The W is from my Windows days, from Winamp :) )
  • Alt+F5: Toggle window maximized mode
  • Win+[ZXCVB]: Playback controls for Amarok
  • Win+R: Run dialog

Let’s begin

  • Open gconf-editor and go to global_keybindings.As you can see the format isn’t hard
  • Set the value of run_command_1 to “q” and the value of run_command_2 to “w” without the quotes (Those correspond to Win+Q and Control+Alt+W)
  • Now go to keybinding_commands
  • Set the value of command_1 to “xterm -ls -fg white -bg black -cc 33:48,37:48,45-47:48,38:48,58:48” and the value of command_2 to “amarok” without the quotes. Now test Win+Q and Control+Alt+W
  • Go to windows_keybindings
  • Set the value of toggle_maximized to “F5”. Now test
  • Run dialog is set using panel_run_dialog under global_keybindings, I set it to “r”. Amarok sets the playback keys by default, but you’ll notice that both Win+R and Win+V don’t work. This happens because Compiz is the default window manager now. To fix this install compizconfig-settings-manager, go to “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings” and disable “Enhanced Zoom Desktop” or change the key bindings. This will free both key bindings so you can use them here

Edit: A weird thing happened to me today, I set the “Visual Effects” in appearance to “None” and suddenly my shortcuts stopped working. The solution to this is simple, make sure you use “r”, not “ R”; Note the extra space before the “R”. Omitting this space works in both cases, something to keep in mind.

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Dev gone Ops gone DevOps. Any views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

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