8

I appear to be suffering from this bug that means my custom keyboard shortcuts are lost on reboot. I have 8 custom shortcuts, and re-setting all 8 via the GUI method for setting keyboard shortcuts is tedious.

I am using 12.10 and Unity. The keyboard shortcuts I want to customise are

  • "Shift to workspace left" (right/above/below) - with shortcut CtrlAltl (h/k/j)
  • "Move window one workspace to the left" (right/up/down) - with shortcut ShiftCtrlAltl (h/k/j).

(At least those are the names I see in the keyboard shortcut dialogs.)

So until the bug is fixed, I would like to be able to run a script to set all 8 after I have logged in. So what command line program and options do I need to run to set a keyboard shortcut?

Community
  • 1
Hamish Downer
  • 19,181

1 Answers1

5

I think you can achieve that effect using a script like this (only deals with switching desktop, but it can be extended changing switch-to-workspace* with move-to-workspace*):

#!/bin/bash
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-up "['<Control><Primary><Alt>k']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-down "['<Control><Primary><Alt>j']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-left "['<Control><Primary><Alt>h']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-to-workspace-right "['<Control><Primary><Alt>l']"

NOTE: Maybe the <Primary> part in shortcut is redundant. Try by yourself.

To automate the process you can also make this script run at startup, using the "Startup Applications" program.

Salem
  • 19,744
  • Nice try, but the /apps/metacity/window_keybindings/switch_to_workspace_up doesn't seem to exist. I'm browsing around using dconf-editor to see where the shortcut might be. – Hamish Downer Nov 04 '12 at 18:29
  • 1
    @HamishDowner if you want to see it you must use gconf-editor – Salem Nov 04 '12 at 18:45
  • Turns out the gconf settings are actually all correct, but the keybindings still don't work :/ Time to go update the bug. – Hamish Downer Nov 04 '12 at 19:08
  • are you sure compiz/unity actually use gconf for these settings? – Hamish Downer Nov 04 '12 at 19:19
  • You are right. I updated the answer. In my system that worked (just replaced one shortcut). – Salem Nov 04 '12 at 20:17
  • 3
    Hi thanks for the useful answer, to quickly search a shortcut path I've found useful the command: # dconf dump / | less (Lists everything) –  Nov 10 '12 at 11:22