Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Annoying keyboard shortcuts in Xfce

Quickie for mint16/17 using Xfce. You may have found the ctrl-Fn keys have been mapped to change the workspace you are on? This behaviour is highly annoying as applications often define ctrl-Fn to do something.

Do not try to fix it from the graphic configuration window. It does not work.

Instead, as root, open this file in a text editor:

/etc/xdg/xdg-default/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml

(Because or links there are about three or four files pointing to this file; it doesn’t matter which one you edit.)

Look for lines like:

<property name="&lt;Control&gt;F5" type="string" value="..."/>

Then delete all those lines, there are 12 in total, from F1 to F12. (In my case they were not in a block, so you had to hunt around to catch all twelve.)

Then you need to logout of your desktop, and log back in again for the change to take effect.

Written with StackEdit.