Better keyboard shortcuts

[Xen]

In case it matters, personally I wish people would just drop their hate 
of Microsoft and actually bind the Windows key on many keyboards to 
something useful. It is just not bound. Why? It is one of the most 
useful keys in existence and has been for a long time on the Windows 
platform, but it does not do anything on Linux even though every 
freaking keyboard just has it, but it is getting ignored.

Instead, I have to press alt-F1 to open my menu (which, on this 
keyboard, kinda sucks).

I believe it is called the Super key? What a stupid name to begin with! 
And Alt is called the Meta key? Equally stupid!!!!.

What keyboard calls this meta? What is the confusion here? Why does it 
have to be so confusing to people? Just call it Alt already!!!!. Every 
keyboard in existence calls it Alt!!!!.

(I just discovered print-screen on my keyboard, lucky me).

What on earth were people thinking when they tried to get away from 
calling it "windows key" and "alt key"????

At least then call it the "command" key like it is on the Mac, but don't 
call it the "super" key by all means, ffs.

command, control and ..... alt ;-).

(that was intended to be a reference to the game command & conquer ;-)).

This single thing is a HUGE usability issue on Linux in general and no 
one even has the mind to fix it, it is just incredible. When other 
systems have all the power, we need to use "alt-F1" and "alt-F2" (in 
KDE) for the most important features -- what the HELL.

And then if you tap the wrong button your program closes (alt-F4) GREAT.

Even the design decision for many programs to honor Ctrl-W (for closing 
a window) and then also honoring Ctrl-Q (for closing the application) is 
downright evil to begin with if you do not ask for confirmation on the 
Ctrl-Q, because these keys are right next to one another and the amount 
of work that people have lost because of this must be monumental.

And now we have in KDE these issues of having to use Ctrl-Shift-C in a 
konsole to copy text (BAAAAAAD choice) while this same button does 
something very different in every major browser. It is the worst 
keyboard shortcut they could have imagined on text copying in a console, 
by far. Even "Ctrl-X" would have been better (it doesn't do anything in 
a browser, and barely anything I can see in a shell/console -- and you 
cannot "cut" text in a console anyway). But more likely you would just 
want to press Enter after selecting text.

Ctrl-shift-C is the worst thing I have had to work with in my life. 
Regarding that.

So I may not know much about Unity these days but I guess Ubuntu is not 
only about Unity, sorry for that.


But this "super" key should just do something useful, and not be 
neglected on every damn keyboard in the planet. (Apple just switches two 
keys, command and alt).



One Infinite Loop schreef op 24-06-2016 10:52:
> I'd like to press, for example, the Menu key and the output be as if I
> pressed Ctrl+R or another combination of keys. In other words, I'd
> like to set aliases for combos using the same graphical user interface
> (System Settings/Keyboard menu) provided by Ubuntu 16.04 to set/change
> keyboard shortcuts. Thanks in advance!
> 
> I do not want to install Autokey, I want a builtin functionality as I
> already mentioned above. In plus, Ctrl+R does one thing inside a
> browser window and another thing inside a terminal window. I just
> want, for example, to press Menu key and Ubuntu to think I pressed
> Ctrl+R. That's all. Just a suggestion.

So you don't want better keyboard shortcuts, you want to be able to 
/create/ keyboard shortcuts in the first place, in the sense of mapping 
one to another.

Like the game controllers for the Super Nintendo when we were young (or 
at least, I was). You could have these power controllers doing difficult 
moves and the one with the controller would win every (fighting) game 
;-).

You could simply record a macro, but maybe we have macro software? That 
is really the answer to your solution: you want to record keyboard 
macro's that have really no delay in them. And you want to bind any key 
to any macro doing that stuff for you. I also do not really know what 
the Menu key is, but that is besides it for me.