Shell – keyboard shortcuts only work with left super-key

arch linuxgnome-shellgnome3keyboard shortcuts

I recently had to change the keyboard-shortcuts after updating my system. I had to use dconf-editor to manually set the shortcut from <Super>+R to <Mod4>+R in order to get them to work (see here).

This does work when I press the right super-key together with the specified alphabetic key, but it does not work when using the left super-key. Also, the gnome-shell menu is set to show up when I press just the super-key, but it only shows up when pressing the left one.

I'd like to have gnome-shell accept both the left and the right super-key for the shortcut, but I don't want to remap the menu-key (which is <Super> by default).

Best Answer

Use xmodmap -pm to verify that both keys have the mod4 modifier associated with them.

vikktakkht:686 Z$ xmodmap -pm
xmodmap:  up to 4 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):

shift       Shift_L (0x32),  Shift_R (0x3e)
lock        Caps_Lock (0x42)
control     Control_L (0x25),  Control_R (0x69)
mod1        Alt_L (0x40),  Alt_R (0x6c),  Meta_L (0xcd)
mod2        Num_Lock (0x4d)
mod3      
mod4        Super_L (0x85),  Super_R (0x86),  Super_L (0xce),  Hyper_L (0xcf)
mod5        ISO_Level3_Shift (0x5c),  Mode_switch (0xcb)

Note that it's not enough that it's named Super_L or Super_R; it's the modifier mapping that matters.

You can use xmodmap to associate keysyms with modifiers, but if your system is at all modern (and not OS X) then it uses Xkb and you probably want to examine your Xkb configuration instead of trying to change it with xmodmap. (Look at setxkbmap and friends, although probably there is a GNOME 3 interface to it that you should use.)

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