Episode: 2094
Title: HPR2094: Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Gnome
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2094/hpr2094.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:14:29

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This is HBR Episode 2094 entitled Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Nome, and in part
of the series Accessibility, it is hosted by John Culp and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is, I demonstrate how to add Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Classic
Nome.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana, recording another Hacker Public
Radio episode.
This one, I don't know if it's, sorry, zip up my case there, I don't know if it's really
part of a series or anything, but this is one of my, it should be a shorter one, it's
just a little pro tip kind of thing to help customize your desktop.
For the longest time, I have run a version of Debian that's closely related to CrunchBang.
At first I ran CrunchBang, but then that seems like the support kind of ran out, and so
I ended up removing the CrunchBang repository from my sources.list file, and just, excuse
me, just running Debian with the OpenBox Window Manager and everything.
Now if you've ever run CrunchBang, one of the really cool things about it is the use
of the super key on the keyboard in conjunction with other keys to launch applications.
This is something I really missed when I'm going, so I've been having a few issues with
the Debian side of my computer lately, and some of those issues are actual deal breakers,
like not recognizing my microphone, which as you know, if you've listened to my other
episodes, is critically important to me to be able to use Blather and the speech recognition
and everything.
If the microphone is not recognized and is not working, I can't do anything.
And so I have another partition on my laptop that has Ubuntu, I've just kind of, for
a couple of years, been booting into the Ubuntu partition occasionally, and running updates
just to kind of make sure everything is up to date and checking out what the latest
things look like.
Well, when the microphone stopped working on the Debian side, I started booting into the
Ubuntu partition more frequently because the microphone still does work on that side
and so I can use my speech recognition on there.
However, I really miss the keystrokes that will launch applications like doing the super
key plus T launches a terminal, the super key plus E launches a text editor, super key
plus W launches the web browser and so forth.
And on OpenBox, you can go into the rc.xml file and add more keystrokes to launch other
applications or basically run any command that you want.
I had mine set up actually for when I was doing my eBooks a lot.
I had keystrokes like the super plus, super plus I would put HTML, italics, tags around
whatever text was selected and then the super plus O would run a little script that inserted
an appropriate hyperlink in the counterpoint textbook that I was doing.
And so anyway, you can really customize your desktop and the actions that you perform
on it if you can make use of that super key to launch stuff.
And for the longest time, I didn't think you could do this on Ubuntu but then yesterday
I was poking around in the keyboard settings and discovered that yes, you can actually
do custom keystrokes if you go into the system by the way, I'm not using the straight-up
unity environment, I'm using, it looks kind of like a little gnome too.
I don't know if it's made or some other, I don't really know.
But it's got the old gnome too kind of look to it.
And so if I click on the upper right hand corner that has the logout shutdown restart and
things like that, one of the options is system settings but there are a couple of different
ways to get into the system settings but if you go in there and click where it says
keyboard, there are a couple of tabs in there.
One is typing where you can set the delay for your repeating keys.
Then you can set the cursor blinking speed but then there's another tab for shortcuts.
It's already got a bunch of shortcuts configured by default.
And then right at the bottom of the list on the left hand side, it says custom shortcuts
and this is where you can start adding your own.
And yesterday I added several.
One of the most important ones for me was the shortcut to toggle blather speech recognition
on and off because what kept happening to me was I'd be using my computer and doing
all kinds of speech commands and just doing my normal work.
And if one of my colleagues comes in to see me which is fairly frequent now that I'm
in the director at School of Music, I get visitors all the time whereas before I could
basically hide in my office all day doing my work in privacy, now my door is almost
always open and people are coming in and I needed to have a way for as soon as somebody
appeared at my door very quickly to turn off my speech recognition so that as I start
talking to this person who's come to see me, my computer does not still think I'm talking
to it and start doing all kinds of crazy things, deleting files, entering text that I didn't
want.
I mean it could really do a lot of damage if it goes on unchecked.
And I got tired of having to tell everybody, wait don't start talking yet, let me turn
off my speech recognition and then going to find it and click in the check box.
So on my open box side I had set up the super plus j key to run a little script that checks
to see whether blather is running or not.
If it is running it kills it, if it's not running it starts it so it just toggles back
and forth.
And so that was the most important keystroke to get working on the Ubuntu side and so
what I did was click the, there's a little plus and a minus thing there on the custom
shortcut so if you click plus it'll ask you the name of your shortcut and so for the
blather when I put toggle blather is the name and then the command is the name of my
little shell script that I want to be executed.
So once you have written in a name for your command and then the command that is to be
run you click apply and then you need to highlight over on the right hand column where
it has the keystrokes.
If you highlight that column it says new accelerator and all you have to do is execute the keystrokes
that you want to use and so for that one I do super plus j and then the configuration
is saved.
It's not active yet until you log out and then log back in.
There might be a way, if one of the things I would really appreciate in comments to
this episode is if you know a way to reload the configuration for these kinds of keyboard
shortcuts without logging out I would love that.
I googled a little bit and didn't really find it.
So I'm going to add that's one that I set up yesterday.
I'm going to add a new one right now and the one I'm going to add right now is one to switch
either launch or switch to LibreOffice.
This is something that just occurred to me to do was to make these launches a little
bit more sophisticated than I had them on the open box side where when I launch, when
I execute the keystrokes say super plus e.
By the way the super key is the on most machines it will be the Windows key.
So the way it worked on my open box side was when I did say super plus e it would just
launch the text editor genie because that's the one I had sat.
It occurred to me yesterday that I could make this a little bit more sophisticated with
a very simple script and what I really want is for the super plus e key not only to launch
genie but if genie is already open to switch focus to it.
So I wrote a little script which checks to see whether a program is open by doing a WMCTRL
space dash L which lists all the currently open windows and then it grips for the window title for in this
case it's going to grip for LibreOffice on my new one and then it sends the output of that to
DevNall but then it checks the return code and if the return code is zero then that means it
found the program and so it's just going to switch to the program.
If it didn't find it that means the program is not open so it's going to launch the program and
I suppose what I'll do is put an example of one of these scripts in the show notes so you can see
that easier but this means that I can use these keystrokes all the time to very very quickly
switch among the most frequently nice frequently used applications so for me super plus b
leader switch to or launch thunderbird super plus k will go to my key pass x thing for my password
database and then what other ones do I have here hey buddy I've got hey buddy for my social
networking super plus h will either switch to or launch hey buddy and so forth so right now
I'm going to do a brand new and so I'm in the keyboard settings I'm going to click the plus
thing I'm going to type for the name of the shortcut LibreOffice and for the command I'm going
to give the name of my script which is called go to LibreOffice.sh go to LibreOffice.sh
and I click apply and at the moment that command is disabled so I'll click on the word disabled
and now I can type the keystroke that I want to use which is super plus l and now that is applied
and so from now on after I log out and back in anytime I hit the super plus l keystroke it's either
going to switch to LibreOffice if it's already open or it's going to launch a new instance of it
if it's not it looks like here I've got chromium I think I want to make that one the super plus w
which will do the same thing for my web browser all right so now that I have
set the new keystroke I'm going to log out then log back in to test it
quit out of a couple of things and shoot up just log out no need to go to every program and log out
these days they're pretty smart about restarting back up especially the web browsers it can start
right back where you left off by restoring the session so I'm at the login screen now
logging back in
okay so I'm going to start by doing super b to launch thunderbird there it is and now super l to
launch LibreOffice they're open right up perfect I'm going to super e to launch my text editor
genie super t to launch terminator and now I'm going to try to switch over to LibreOffice
by doing super plus l perfect okay so anyway if you run the old gnome desktop I'd be curious
to see whether these keystrokes actually work on unity or gnome 3 I'll have to log into sessions
in those desktops and see if they work but anyway if you're doing the old style gnome 2
thing and you want to have some custom keystrokes to switch back and forth between your different
applications and give it a go or you know if there's if you just want to have a keystroke to make
e speak say something rude to somebody you can you can basically make a do any command you want
all right that's it I think I'm gonna cut it out it's actually longer than I thought it was
going to be sorry about that let's see how long it ended up being nearly 13 minutes all right that's
enough I will talk to you guys some other time bye
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