0

I was recently rather annoyed by my Ctrl+Shift+e shortcut in one of the applications I develop that suddenly stopped working and was making my life difficult. I've learned in this question that it is a shortcut to enter emojis, and that Ctrl+Shift+u is a way to directly type in unicode keypoints. Using any of those as a keyboard shortcut is a huge pain, since they are interpreted before they reach the application (at the xkb level ?), so they wreak havoc when using keyboard shortcuts. I have two questions:

  1. is there a comprehensive list of these "shortcuts" I better avoided as a developper ?
  2. is there a way to disable them in specific contexts?

I guess the latter question is probably more a stackoverflow question.

Vincent Fourmond
  • 226
  • Any question should always include the version of Ubuntu you are using. Please edit the question or add a flag. What version is it? – David Jan 26 '21 at 13:20
  • https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/shell-keyboard-shortcuts.html.en – C.S.Cameron Jan 26 '21 at 14:20
  • @David The question is how to find the information regardless of the version. I'm designing software and I want to avoid shortcut clashes as those can be extremely annoying. – Vincent Fourmond Jan 26 '21 at 15:01
  • @C.S.Cameron Thanks ! The shortcuts I mention are not listed there however (maybe they were phased out in the latest Ubuntu versions ?) – Vincent Fourmond Jan 26 '21 at 15:02

1 Answers1

2

I am afraid there is no such "comprehensive list" of keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are conventions. Some of these are widely used, many not. The assignment of keyboard shortcuts can differ between operating system, between different desktop environments, and between applications. Gnome Shell prefers Ctrl+PgDn to navigate between tabs, in Firefox, it's Ctrl+Tab.

As a programmer, you certainly are aware of the following (you refer to it), but I mention it for completeness.

Keyboard shortcuts can be system wide, e.g. Alt+F4 to close a window. They will trigger the same action irrespective of the application in focus. They will eventually override the definition of the same keystroke at the level of the application (i.e., they have priority).

Other keyboard applications are defined by the application, e.g. Ctrl+q will be defined in many cases to quit the program. Ctrl+c will in the vast majority of applications be used to to copy information to the system clipboard.

None of these are set in stone, as you discovered. Ctrl+Shift+e in Ubuntu happens to trigger the entry of Emoj (at least it does not for me on Ubuntu 20.10), but that is not a convention that is widely used.

In short, no, there is no universal list of "reserved" keyboard shortcuts. As a programmer, you need to choose your combinations carefully. Don't worry too much. If you make the wrong choice at some point, your users will likely get back to you soon to fix it in an update.

vanadium
  • 88,010