I use a good deal of the default Ubuntu shortcuts as shortcuts in Emacs (Alt–Space is the most important). I obviously have disabled these shortcuts in the keyboard shortcuts dialog, but for whatever reason, they sometimes "come back", generally after I've installed/uninstalled certain packages, or upgraded Ubuntu.
My question therefore is: how do I keep these shortcuts disabled? I don't want shortcuts like Alt–Space restored for any reason.
Best Answer
There are several ubuntu bugs in launchpad about keyboard shortcuts settings being reset to default.
It seems that when you switch the 'Backend' setting to 'Flat-file Configuration Backend' in CompizConfig Settings Manager under 'Preferences', the keyboard shortcuts changes seem persistent. You'll have to do a unity --replace for the changes to take affect.