X hotkeys with xbindkeys

© September 2009 Girish Venkatachalam
by Girish Venkatachalam

Girish Venkatachalam is a UNIX hacker with more than a decade of networking and crypto programming experience. His hobbies include yoga,cycling, cooking and he runs his own business. Details here:

https://gayatri-hitech.com
https://spam-cheetah.com

xbindkeys is very easy to use when you wish to bind hotkey presses on X sessions. Either when you are on a xterm or otherwise. You have be within the Xwindow session, that is all. Typical Xwindow sessions span multiple virtual displays or workspaces and typically on linux you have Xwindow running on virtual terminal Alt + Ctrl + F7. Anyway I think you know what I mean.

I created a default keybindings file with

$ xbindkeys --defaults > $HOME/.xbindkeysrc

The syntax is braindead simple.

"pidgin"
  Control + b2 + Release
 

If you want to invoke pidgin when you press Ctrl key on the keyboard with the second mouse button.

But things get complicated. You have to know keycodes. You can easily find that by running

$ xbindkeys -k
 

It throws up a small white screen a la xev and you will know which keycode corresponds to which key.

After that just start the xbindkeys daemon with

$ xbindkeys
 

Every time you change a binding you have to restart this daemon or send the HUP signal.

$ pkill -HUP xbindkeys
 

I find that you can create a long command as a shell script and then bind it. That is more useful to me from a practical point of view.

For instance,

I create a /bin/playaudio file like this.

   #!/bin/sh
   mplayer /home/music/file1.mp3

And then chmod it.

# chmod +x /bin/playaudio
 

Then configure xkeybindings file like this.

"playaudio"

 Mod_M + b1
 

This will play a song when I press the useless Windows key along with mouse button 1.

Please refer to the command I gave above to figure out keycodes and keynames. It is very useful.

Got something to add? Send me email.

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