[Techtalk] Starting apps with keyboard in Gnome

[Wim De Smet]

On 3/25/07, David Sumbler <david at aeolia.co.uk> wrote:
> Because she is the sort of person who tends to get frightened by unusual
> behaviour from the computer, and seems to find it difficult to follow a
> sequence of instructions, I thought that I would install a script on her
> machine, with the line "killall evolution", and set up a hotkey to
> activate it - e.g. Ctrl-Alt-E.  (Remember, she can't use the mouse on
> these occasions, so it has to be activated from the keyboard.)
>
> Can this be done in Gnome?  I can't seem to find how to do set keys to
> issue particular commands.

I had a quick look and it seems to be possible by editing gconf
settings. If you have gconf-editor installed open it up and navigate
to apps/metacity. There you have a global_keybindings dir and under
that about 10 keys for keybindings that you can then bind to commands
in keybinding_commands (the keys are documented so just click one and
you'll get the explanation). The same is doable with gconftool but
less straightforward.

greets,
Wim