The keyboard-settings pane in Ubuntu allows custom keyboard combinations to launch applications or scripts. This feature is currently missing from elementary OS’s keyboard plug. However, with a little command line foo we can setup the keybindings without the GUI.
First we need to install gconf2. It may be installed already, but in case it’s not:
sudo apt-get install gconf2
Next we use gconf tool to query which keybindings are already out there:
gconftool-2 --all-dirs "/desktop/gnome/keybindings"
On my machine, this returns 1 entry: /desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom0 We can dig deeper by executing:
gconftool-2 --all-entries "/desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom0"
name = Launch Terminal
action = x-terminal-emulator
binding = <Control><Alt>t
We can see that by default there is only 1 keybinding that launches a terminal. Now we can create our own with the following commands:
gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom1/name" --type string "Launch Switchboard" gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom1/action" --type string "switchboard" gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/keybindings/custom1/binding" --type string "<Control><Alt><Shift>s"
Each keybinding needs it’s own folder. In this case, I used “custom1” since “custom0” was already in use. The rest should be pretty self-explanatory: give it a name, an action (command or script to run) and the keybinding you’d like to use.
Doesnt work on my setup (elementary luna beta2)
Do you need to restart or anything for the shortcut to work ?
Well, after rebooting, it works fine
I believe this is a real great weblog article.Much thanks again. Awesome.
Will this work with a scrollwheel?
I want to be able to set volume up/down with Super+scroll up/down
You could try using <Button4> or <Button5> for mouse scroll events, but I doubt that will work.
Instead, you may have to use something like xbindkeys. I did a post on xbindkeys here: http://www.heath-bar.com/blog/?p=523 In that article, I bound the + mouse scroll to type + Plus/Minus, but you could change it to enter the Volume Up/Down keys instead.