Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: uniform-keyboard-shortcuts

• Created: 2009-09-20

Keyboard shortcuts in GNU/Linux are not as uniform as in, say the Macintosh. Having uniform keyboard shortcuts for common tasks which do not conflict is an integral part of a good user interface. While the trinity of cut-copy-paste shortcuts have been almost universally implemented, there are quite a few other shortcuts that should be common (closing a window, quitting an application, opening preferences, property pages).

An account of how I tried to achieve some uniformity in keyboard shortcuts is given on my blog at http://abhidg.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/making-keyboard-shortcuts-in-linux-as-uniform-as-the-mac/.

I think that application quitting and preferences at least should have uniform shortcuts. Most GTK+ applications will need very little tweaking to change the keyboard shortcuts, while some programs like VLC need to be patched.

KDE has a setting for uniform keyboard shortcuts, using which users can for example change the shortcut of the Cut command to something else globally, and the change will be reflected in (almost) all KDE applications.