changing *that* keyboard shortcut right there (in gnome)

I love my keyboard shortcuts, and I sometimes I want to change them. If you’re ever in a gnome application and wanted to change *that one right there*, you can now live-edit them!

In a terminal, first enable this feature:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels true

Next, hover over the menu item shortcut that you want to change. Enter the shortcut you want. It should update immediately! I like to disable this live-editing, so that I don’t accidentally change any shortcuts. To do so run:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface can-change-accels false

Too bad firefox doesn’t support this. This is one more reason why native GTK apps make your entire experience blend together (consistent) and more magic!

Happy hacking!

James

PS: If you’re curious, I used this to change the gnome-terminal and gedit cycle tab left/right actions to instead respond to the thinkpad back/forward keys which are conveniently located right above the left and right arrow keys respectively.

Source: http://library.gnome.org/users/evolution/3.3/change-keyboard-shortcuts.html.en

getting gedit to work like magic

i use gnu/linux. it’s probably no secret. what is more of a secret, is that i secretly (well actually not so secretly) love using gedit for editing text. i still use vim, echo (gnu bash) and emacs (but only for org-mode).

vim is really, really great. but for day to day full-screen coding, i love working in gedit. i only have one [1] longstanding gripe, and today i believe that it is solved. here is the magic combination which appeases my troubled spirit:

• gedit smart spaces plugin [2]
• gedit autotab plugin [3]
• gedit modelines plugin [4]

install these, restart gedit, enable them, and happy coding!
while it will be much friendlier to use spaces for indentation, i still recommend using tabs, i mean, that’s what the 0x09 was invented for!

[1] actually i wish that everyone would just use eight-space-tabs for all their coding needs, but i realize there are some problems with this, and so i reluctantly am glad that modelines and the above magic exist.

[2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit-plugins/tree/plugins/smartspaces

[3] http://code.google.com/p/gedit-autotab/

[4] http://library.gnome.org/users/gedit/stable/gedit-modelines-plugin.html.en