Ubuntu 18.04 "Super+O" can't trigger shortcut event

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 and I used xmodmap to changed left Alt as "Meta_L" and bind it solely to "mod4" (meaning I did remember to remove "Mod1" from Meta_L), the end result is left Alt behaves like "Command" in Mac OS so I can use the same keyboard shortcuts of IntelliJ and Sublime Text as I do in Mac OS.

However I found out that for whatever reason, "Super + O ('Oh' not '0')" or "Super + Shift + O" binding can't produce the shortcut event. At the same time "Super + B", "Super + Shift + up" and etc. all work as expected.

I was wondering if "Super + O" is system shortcut that override the application shortcut but after some research I can't find any.

At last, I used the same technique in Ubuntu 16.04 too and every thing works as expected.

Hope someone can share their experience and idea on this, thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I ran into this problem (Ubuntu 19.10) and found this page. I was trying to use Super+O for a shortcut but it didn't work. Thanks to Anbu's answer showing gsettings I was able to figure out what was grabbing the key:

(for schema in $(gsettings list-schemas); do gsettings list-recursively $schema; done) | grep '<Super>o'

It showed org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys rotate-video-lock-static ['<Super>o'] so I removed it with

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys rotate-video-lock-static []

I restarted and was able to use the key again. I found lots more unwanted bindings with

(for schema in $(gsettings list-schemas); do gsettings list-recursively $schema; done) | grep '<Super>'

and then removed them with gsettings set …

Answer 2

I did fresh install recently and was able to map Super+O without issues with xbindkeys. Create a file ~/.xbindkeysrc with

"your command here"
 Mod2+Mod4 + o

And execute:

xbindkeys -f ~/.xbindkeysrc

However I had issue with Super+p which was resolved by disabling default key binding for switching monitors:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.keybindings switch-monitor=['']

That was a little tricky because "dconf dump" doesn't mention it while "gsettings list-recursively" does.

So, you may check your system keybinding and clean them up before using xbindkeys to change them.

Here are dotfiles where it works.

Answer 3

I end up re-installing 16.04 LTS and everything works as expected.