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158 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
158 lines
12 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 2094
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Title: HPR2094: Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Gnome
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2094/hpr2094.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:14:29
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---
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This is HBR Episode 2094 entitled Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Nome, and in part
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of the series Accessibility, it is hosted by John Culp and is about 14 minutes long.
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The summary is, I demonstrate how to add Custom Keystrokes for Desktop Navigation on Classic
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Nome.
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This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
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At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
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Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana, recording another Hacker Public
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Radio episode.
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This one, I don't know if it's, sorry, zip up my case there, I don't know if it's really
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part of a series or anything, but this is one of my, it should be a shorter one, it's
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just a little pro tip kind of thing to help customize your desktop.
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For the longest time, I have run a version of Debian that's closely related to CrunchBang.
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At first I ran CrunchBang, but then that seems like the support kind of ran out, and so
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I ended up removing the CrunchBang repository from my sources.list file, and just, excuse
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me, just running Debian with the OpenBox Window Manager and everything.
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Now if you've ever run CrunchBang, one of the really cool things about it is the use
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of the super key on the keyboard in conjunction with other keys to launch applications.
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This is something I really missed when I'm going, so I've been having a few issues with
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the Debian side of my computer lately, and some of those issues are actual deal breakers,
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like not recognizing my microphone, which as you know, if you've listened to my other
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episodes, is critically important to me to be able to use Blather and the speech recognition
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and everything.
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If the microphone is not recognized and is not working, I can't do anything.
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And so I have another partition on my laptop that has Ubuntu, I've just kind of, for
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a couple of years, been booting into the Ubuntu partition occasionally, and running updates
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just to kind of make sure everything is up to date and checking out what the latest
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things look like.
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Well, when the microphone stopped working on the Debian side, I started booting into the
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Ubuntu partition more frequently because the microphone still does work on that side
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and so I can use my speech recognition on there.
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However, I really miss the keystrokes that will launch applications like doing the super
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key plus T launches a terminal, the super key plus E launches a text editor, super key
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plus W launches the web browser and so forth.
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And on OpenBox, you can go into the rc.xml file and add more keystrokes to launch other
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applications or basically run any command that you want.
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I had mine set up actually for when I was doing my eBooks a lot.
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I had keystrokes like the super plus, super plus I would put HTML, italics, tags around
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whatever text was selected and then the super plus O would run a little script that inserted
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an appropriate hyperlink in the counterpoint textbook that I was doing.
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And so anyway, you can really customize your desktop and the actions that you perform
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on it if you can make use of that super key to launch stuff.
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And for the longest time, I didn't think you could do this on Ubuntu but then yesterday
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I was poking around in the keyboard settings and discovered that yes, you can actually
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do custom keystrokes if you go into the system by the way, I'm not using the straight-up
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unity environment, I'm using, it looks kind of like a little gnome too.
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I don't know if it's made or some other, I don't really know.
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But it's got the old gnome too kind of look to it.
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And so if I click on the upper right hand corner that has the logout shutdown restart and
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things like that, one of the options is system settings but there are a couple of different
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ways to get into the system settings but if you go in there and click where it says
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keyboard, there are a couple of tabs in there.
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One is typing where you can set the delay for your repeating keys.
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Then you can set the cursor blinking speed but then there's another tab for shortcuts.
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It's already got a bunch of shortcuts configured by default.
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And then right at the bottom of the list on the left hand side, it says custom shortcuts
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and this is where you can start adding your own.
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And yesterday I added several.
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One of the most important ones for me was the shortcut to toggle blather speech recognition
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on and off because what kept happening to me was I'd be using my computer and doing
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all kinds of speech commands and just doing my normal work.
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And if one of my colleagues comes in to see me which is fairly frequent now that I'm
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in the director at School of Music, I get visitors all the time whereas before I could
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basically hide in my office all day doing my work in privacy, now my door is almost
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always open and people are coming in and I needed to have a way for as soon as somebody
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appeared at my door very quickly to turn off my speech recognition so that as I start
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talking to this person who's come to see me, my computer does not still think I'm talking
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to it and start doing all kinds of crazy things, deleting files, entering text that I didn't
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want.
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I mean it could really do a lot of damage if it goes on unchecked.
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And I got tired of having to tell everybody, wait don't start talking yet, let me turn
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off my speech recognition and then going to find it and click in the check box.
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So on my open box side I had set up the super plus j key to run a little script that checks
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to see whether blather is running or not.
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If it is running it kills it, if it's not running it starts it so it just toggles back
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and forth.
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And so that was the most important keystroke to get working on the Ubuntu side and so
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what I did was click the, there's a little plus and a minus thing there on the custom
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shortcut so if you click plus it'll ask you the name of your shortcut and so for the
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blather when I put toggle blather is the name and then the command is the name of my
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little shell script that I want to be executed.
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So once you have written in a name for your command and then the command that is to be
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run you click apply and then you need to highlight over on the right hand column where
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it has the keystrokes.
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If you highlight that column it says new accelerator and all you have to do is execute the keystrokes
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that you want to use and so for that one I do super plus j and then the configuration
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is saved.
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It's not active yet until you log out and then log back in.
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There might be a way, if one of the things I would really appreciate in comments to
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this episode is if you know a way to reload the configuration for these kinds of keyboard
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shortcuts without logging out I would love that.
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I googled a little bit and didn't really find it.
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So I'm going to add that's one that I set up yesterday.
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I'm going to add a new one right now and the one I'm going to add right now is one to switch
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either launch or switch to LibreOffice.
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This is something that just occurred to me to do was to make these launches a little
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bit more sophisticated than I had them on the open box side where when I launch, when
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I execute the keystrokes say super plus e.
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By the way the super key is the on most machines it will be the Windows key.
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So the way it worked on my open box side was when I did say super plus e it would just
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launch the text editor genie because that's the one I had sat.
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It occurred to me yesterday that I could make this a little bit more sophisticated with
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a very simple script and what I really want is for the super plus e key not only to launch
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genie but if genie is already open to switch focus to it.
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So I wrote a little script which checks to see whether a program is open by doing a WMCTRL
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space dash L which lists all the currently open windows and then it grips for the window title for in this
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case it's going to grip for LibreOffice on my new one and then it sends the output of that to
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DevNall but then it checks the return code and if the return code is zero then that means it
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found the program and so it's just going to switch to the program.
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If it didn't find it that means the program is not open so it's going to launch the program and
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I suppose what I'll do is put an example of one of these scripts in the show notes so you can see
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that easier but this means that I can use these keystrokes all the time to very very quickly
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switch among the most frequently nice frequently used applications so for me super plus b
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leader switch to or launch thunderbird super plus k will go to my key pass x thing for my password
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database and then what other ones do I have here hey buddy I've got hey buddy for my social
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networking super plus h will either switch to or launch hey buddy and so forth so right now
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I'm going to do a brand new and so I'm in the keyboard settings I'm going to click the plus
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thing I'm going to type for the name of the shortcut LibreOffice and for the command I'm going
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to give the name of my script which is called go to LibreOffice.sh go to LibreOffice.sh
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and I click apply and at the moment that command is disabled so I'll click on the word disabled
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and now I can type the keystroke that I want to use which is super plus l and now that is applied
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and so from now on after I log out and back in anytime I hit the super plus l keystroke it's either
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going to switch to LibreOffice if it's already open or it's going to launch a new instance of it
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if it's not it looks like here I've got chromium I think I want to make that one the super plus w
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which will do the same thing for my web browser all right so now that I have
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set the new keystroke I'm going to log out then log back in to test it
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quit out of a couple of things and shoot up just log out no need to go to every program and log out
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these days they're pretty smart about restarting back up especially the web browsers it can start
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right back where you left off by restoring the session so I'm at the login screen now
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logging back in
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okay so I'm going to start by doing super b to launch thunderbird there it is and now super l to
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launch LibreOffice they're open right up perfect I'm going to super e to launch my text editor
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genie super t to launch terminator and now I'm going to try to switch over to LibreOffice
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by doing super plus l perfect okay so anyway if you run the old gnome desktop I'd be curious
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to see whether these keystrokes actually work on unity or gnome 3 I'll have to log into sessions
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in those desktops and see if they work but anyway if you're doing the old style gnome 2
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thing and you want to have some custom keystrokes to switch back and forth between your different
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applications and give it a go or you know if there's if you just want to have a keystroke to make
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e speak say something rude to somebody you can you can basically make a do any command you want
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all right that's it I think I'm gonna cut it out it's actually longer than I thought it was
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going to be sorry about that let's see how long it ended up being nearly 13 minutes all right that's
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enough I will talk to you guys some other time bye
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you've been listening to hecka public radio at hecka public radio dot org we are a community podcast
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network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our shows
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was contributed by an hbr listener like yourself if you ever thought of recording a podcast
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on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself unless otherwise status today's show is
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released on the creative comments attribution share a light 3.0 license
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