Centos – How to reset linux centOS 6.0 keyboard shortcuts with custom changes to default one

I am glad to see another ratpoison user. Let me tell you that I am a happy and satisfied ratpoison user and can not think of another window manager right now. It has increased my speed and productivity multiple times.

Now coming to your problem. The key conflicting part you can handle by pressing the key again after pressing the escape keycombination. e.g. I have my escape keybinding as Ctrl-a. Now if I want to select all the text or want to send cursor at the starting of line in bash I, have to press Ctrl-a then only a again after releasing escape keybinding.

For your other queries I need to do some reading.

The last time I tried it, GNOME-Shell (i.e., Metacity is important here, I suppose) was controllable with wmctrl just fine. So you can add shortcuts calling wmctrl to switch the workspace.

Be aware that it only knows about workspace 1, 2, ... -- so there might be some work involved before it behaves as you'd like it to.

(You could be better off with diving into GNOME-Shell's sources; the relevant parts here are written in Javascript and it could be fairly easy to get your keys the way you'd like them. I tried something similar with the keybindings of the window switcher Alt+Tab thingy, I'm not actually sure if the workspace switching is accessible in a similar way; still it might be worth a look.)

No idea about Unity, though.