Gnome Tips

Here follow some suggestions on how to tweak Gnome for your own needs.

Adding custom shortcuts

You may want to bind an arbitrary keyboard shortcut to an action (eg. launching an application), but the default Gnome tool allows only a set of predefined actions. Here is the procedure to add custom actions to bind to a key combination.

First you have to launch the tool gconf-editor; if you don't have it, install it:

# apt-get install gconf-editor

Then you have to find the key "apps->metacity->keybinding_commands->command_1" through the gconf tree.

There you can specify (in the "value" field) the command to be launched (eg. xterm).

You have associated "command_1" to the command "xterm".

Now go on and define the key combination; go to "apps->metacity->global_keybindings->run_command_1" and put in the "value" field the key combination you like (eg. <Alt>F1).

Now you should be able to launch the command xterm with Alt+F1.