Ubuntu – Disable Ctrl-Alt-L’s behavior of locking the screen

16.04lock-screenshortcut-keysunity

I need to disable the Ctrl–Alt–L key combination to use it for IntelliJ (an IDE). I have managed to do it on my desktop computer which currently runs 17.10, but I cannot figure out how to do it on 16.04 which my XPS 13 Developer Edition runs.

I have found Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts, and disabled the System -> Lock Screen entry. Still locks.

I tried reassigning to Show/Hide onscreen keyboard. Toggles on screen keyboard and still locks.

I tried re-reassigning to System -> Lock Screen. Still locks (that was expected though) but now the login dialogue is very simple. A white rectangle with a password field at the top.

I tried re-disabling it. Same login dialogue as before.

As the screen does not lock when entering the key in the Shortcuts field, it seems that this is essentially working as designed, but there is a problem with telling the locking process that it should not do anything.

How should I approach this?

Best Answer

This worked for me: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24908490/ubuntu-do-not-lock-the-screen-when-pressing-superl

Basically: Unity also has a shortcut that overrides the one in the keyboard configuration, and you can edit it using CompizConfig (you can install it via Ubuntu Software, search for CompizConfig Settings Manager). Remapping wasn't working in all cases for me, but completely disabling the shortcut (uncheck "Enabled") did the trick. Ctrl+Alt+L now works well in IntelliJ Idea.

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Ubuntu – How to prevent the screen from locking when I want a virtual machine to ungrab the mouse

the issue is the description is a bit misleading (for me as well) ..
ctrl_L .. doesnt mean ctrl+l but the left! ctrl button

so you just have to press ctrl + alt (without any other char) on the left side of the keybord

Ubuntu – How to prevent the Sleep button from locking the screen

You can remap the key using ~/.Xmodmap. Use xev (in a terminal) to find the offending keycode, then assign a different keysym, e.g. XF86WakeUp. Append this line to ~/.Xmodmap (create that file if it does not yet exist):

keycode 150 = XF86WakeUp

After logging out and logging in again your key should be mapped. If you don't want to log out, you can also use xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap to reload the key mappings.

Using xev to actually find the keycode of the key that you want to remap might be not so easy: if the key is already bound to an action (e.g. in the Gnome keyboard properties), xev does not show the keycode. As an example, this is the kind of xev output that you want to see:

KeyPress event, serial 41, synthetic NO, window 0x5800001,
    root 0xb3, subw 0x0, time 312883, (737,182), root:(946,647),
    state 0x0, keycode 180 (keysym 0x1008ff18, XF86HomePage), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

You can see the keycode (180) in the third line after the word "keycode". If you don't get such a block that starts with "KeyPress event", your key probably is already bound. You can try to use a non-Gnome desktop like LXDE or KDE and use xev there.

Best Answer

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