API for binding and unbinding a key combo?

[Thiago Macieira]

Bastien Nocera wrote:
>On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 15:19 +1100, Justin Clift wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm looking for a "works across all window managers" way of setting a
>> Control-Printscreen key binding in my (Glib/GTK based) application.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>
>This is how to do it for GNOME:
>http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/CustomKeybindings
>
>If you want to use the application defined keybindings, see:
>http://live.gnome.org/ControlCenter/ApplicationDefinedKeybindings
>
>The problem with the latter is that you still need your application to
>be running, and the keys to be grabbed by the application using
>XGrabKey.

KDE 4 now has a centralised global shortcut management system. The reasons 
for doing that are because:

 - information is persistent: you're notified of a conflict even if the 
other app isn't running or even if it has never been run
 - XGrabKey is, per definition, platform (X11) specific, but I have no 
idea if our solution has been ported to other platforms
 - support for complex key combinations, especially prefixes (à la Emacs), 
though hopefully no one will use that
 - get rid of the problem that "the shortcut doesn't work and no one knows 
why" because another application has grabbed it and you don't know which
 (or it sometimes work, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the order in 
which you started the apps)

Drawbacks are increased complexity and Single Point of Failure (kded 
crashes → all global shortcuts lost).

This API is accessible via D-Bus. If wanted, we could work on making it an 
fd.o spec.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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