Ubuntu 12.04: Changing Hotkey for “Activities”

Question

I want to customize the hotkey for the Activities-overlay in Gnome shell in Ubuntu 12.04.

I tried to edit both:

• /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu
• /apps/mutter/general/overlay_key

with gconf but unfortunetaly it did not work.

My goal was to set Alt + space as the new hotkey because I have some other OS's were Alt+Space has some similar functionality.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You should be able to simply do that in Keyboard settings:

^{Gnome 3.10 - should be the same for most versions of Gnome 3}

Gconf is deprecated - you are supposed to use dconf - which can be done simply using dconf-editor.

You need to look for:

org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu

It should be in this format - it might cause problems otherwise:

['<Super>s', '<Alt>F1']

You can get the current value using:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu

And you can set the current value using:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu 'VALUE'

In this case, 'VALUE' would equal "['<Alt>space', '<Alt>F1']":

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu "'<Alt>space', '<Alt>F1'"

You can reset it using:

 gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu

As you can see, you can also use gsettings to change things - for a manual page on it run:

man gsettings

But it does the same thing as the keyboard settings dialogue.