I am using Gnome in Ubuntu 11.04. I work a lot in Emacs, and I find that the Gnome window manager grabs some of the Emacs keys. To some extent, I can stop this by laboriously going through each of System->Preferences->Keyboard shortcuts and disabling the offending keys. However it would be nice to do this once for everything. In addition, my latest problem is with org-mode, M-S-up should be org-shiftmetaup (org-move-subtree-up) but the window manager is grabbing that key combination and making shrunken windows. However, I cannot find that in the Keyboard Shortcuts list; I don't use it and have no idea what they call it (and it doesn't seem you can look up/edit the short cuts by key combination, only by name).
So my questions are:
- Is there one Gnome configuration change I can make that will by default disable all keyboard short cuts?
- Is there then a way to re-enable some of them? (I don't use them much, but might want a couple that don't conflict with Emacs.)
- Failing that, is there a way to disable shortcuts that conflict with Emacs, for instance by moving Meta to the Super key for Gnome only and not emacs?
- Short of 3, is there a way to find a shortcut by the key combination so it can be disabled individually?
Best Answer
Move the Meta key to the Windows keys in your keyboard settings (“Keyboard Preferences → Layouts → Options → Alt/Win key behavior → Meta is mapped to Win keys”. The window manager will still use Alt, and Emacs will use Meta.