Going back five years, I fondly remember the Gnome window manager Metacity launching applications at the press of a keyboard shortcut, simply by adding an entry with the gconf-editor utility [1]. As a heavy terminal user, I probably open about 100 such windows in the course of the day, so it was a great time saver to map the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+N to a shell script that opened the new terminal with a special font and background color no matter which application the keyboard was currently focused on.

With the Compiz window manager now reigning over the Unity desktop, this capability seems to be a thing of the past, and I'm just fed up of continually modifying my scripts to reflect the changing fashions that desktop frameworks tend to follow.

Middle Man

Instead, in this column, I will be looking to put a man in the middle to handle the interface between the keyboard, the window manager currently en vogue in the Gnome world, and the actions I want to trigger.

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