"Win" key in KDE

Task switching in KDE + CompizFusion

[2007-12-17]

I haven't used KDE on my desktop since ... mmm ... RedHat 7.2 days. And recently I upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty to Gutsy, and I figured I'd try Kubuntu.

And I'm enjoying it. The single-click to start / open didn't take too long to get used to. I like KDE's kio-slaves very much, especially fish://. And kate's regex support beats any gedit regex plugins I could find. I still use Gnome at home, and I won't change. I like the idea of keeping both, and the rest of the family is used to Gnome.

With KDE, I installed CompizFusion, and it starts on login. It has taken me a while to figure out how to get my "Logo" / "Win" / "Super" key to do anything. I want to use it for task switching. (The Shift Switcher is very pretty, but is bound to Super+Tab, which makes sense, and I want to leave it bound to that.)

I eventually found the keyboard setting I was looking for:


  1. Click the "K" menu ... Choose "System Settings" ... "Regional & Language" [yep, not "Keyboard & Mouse"] ... "Keyboard Layout" ... Xkb Options".

  2. Check "Enable xkb options"

  3. Scroll down to "Alt/Win key behaviour" and select "Super is mapped to the Win-keys (default)."

  4. Apply

But I wanted to make it system-wide. So I edited the keyboard section in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to the following:


Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "kbd"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc104"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "us"
        Option          "XkbOptions"    "altwin:super_win"
EndSection

It's the "altwin:super_win" that does the magic.

I restarted X, and now my task switcher makes me very happy.

☙