Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Emacs Key Bindings

As I am becoming more at home in the Unity interface I came across the annoying problem that Unity binds the <Control><Alt>t chord for starting a terminal window. While that is a fine chord for that, and I believe that starting a new terminal should be as easy as possible, that key-binding is already used for something I use even more frequently, transpose Sex-Ps in Emacs.

In the past this could easily be rebound by using ccsm, the CompizConfig Settings Manager, and entering the Gnome Compatibility plug-in and setting it to something else. Unity (at least what comes with 12.04) ignores this binding, it seems. In fact it seems that there are several places where this binding might be set. I remembered stumbling upon a list of bindings in MyUnity, or UbuntuTweak, or some other third party tweaking app, but I have long since forgotten where that was. But using every place I found, disabling that key-binding never had any effect.

I finally took the time to work out a solution today. The solution is to get my hands dirty and use gconf-editor directly. I don't think gconf-editor is included in the default install of Ubuntu, so you need to:

sudo aptitude install gconf-editor

Start the program and search for keys that have the word "terminal" in them. I found three places where that key-binding was specified and I wiped out the value in each, though it was the first key value that seemed to matter. Then if you wish to set a binding, run CompizConfig Settings Manager and edit the key binding to start a terminal under the Gnome Compatibility plug-in. Once again, CompizConfig Settings Manager doesn't come installed by default, so:

sudo aptitude install ccsm

I don't think that Canonical is really interested in promoting deep customization of their OS or window manager, something that is not very GNU/Linux or Libre Software like. This is a very different zeitgeist from the GNU/Linux of a decade ago, or even five years ago. Maybe that is why I had such trouble changing this binding. How is this not a bug that would have been fixed in 11.04? It's all fine, though, so long as they don't take that extra step of actually obstructing people from customizing things.

Update: I recently reinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 and used none of the old configuration files in the new install. After this, setting the shortcut under Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts (tab) -> Launchers does the correct thing. No need for gconf-editor or ccsm or anything else.