Shell – How to add additional Gnome-Shell and Unity workspace navigation shortcuts

gnome-shellgnome3keyboard shortcutsunityvim

I am very familiar with (and love) the workspace switching in Gnome-Shell and Unity (using Ctrl+Alt+[Up/Down/Right/Left]), but being a vim fan, it would also be great if I could add an additional shortcut which would use the vim keys for navigating, so that you could also use

<Ctrl-Alt-[hjkl]>

as appropriate.

Now, I'm quite familiar with how to override the exisiting shortcuts, but I would like to add additional shortcuts. I have a hint of where to start, but am lacking a detail.

When I go to the keyboard settings, I recognize that I could simply switch the short cuts for move workspace right/left and so on, but that doesn't help me add a new command at all. It seems that the right way to go about this is to add a new command in the 'Custom Shortcust' section of that page. Doing that I can set (for example) to be any command that I want, but I don't know what command I would need to send in order to tell Gnome to move a workspace down. I've searched around a bit but I'm having trouble finding anything along these lines. If you are familiar with Gnome3/Gnome-Shell/Unity commands, would you please help me find a command line command that I could execute in order to get what I want here?

Thanks for your time.

Chris

Best Answer

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.

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