Make the Windows Key Open the Gnome Panel Menu

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Gnome by admin

We’ve already covered how to make that Windows Key useful in KDE and Xfce, but what about Gnome? Well these instructions should help you out getting the Windows Key to open up the Gnome Panel Menu.

Make the Windows Key Open the Xfce menu

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Xfce by admin

This allows you to bind your ‘windows’ key to the desktop right-click menu or middle-click menu, for example.

By default, the windows key is considered Super_L, a modifier key. Therefore you’d have to bind a command to windows+[some_key], which is not what we want. So what you want to do is re-map your windows key so that it’s not a modifier. The easiest way to do this is to use xmodmap like so:

xmodmap -e “keycode 227 = Menu” &

(on older versions of xfce it will be xmodmap -e “keycode 115 = Menu” & )

“Menu” above specifies that when you press the windows key, it will pop-up the app’s menu. We will later overwrite this to pop-up an Xfce menu. The 115 above is the keycode for the windows key. It should work for most people, but you can verify what it is for you with xev.

Now that you’ve changed your windows key to Menu, you can use it with one of the following shortcuts:

xfdesktop -menu <– pops up the right-click menu

xfdesktop -windowlist <– pops up the middle-click window list

If this all works out for you, you may wish to put the xmodmap command in your .xinitrc or .xsession file so that it will execute on startup.

Make the Windows Key on your Keyboard open KMenu in KDE

Posted on March 4th, 2008 in KDE, Tweaks by admin

Many people want the KDE menu on Kicker (Kmenu) to open up using the “Windows Keys” that’s taken over every keyboard in the world. Below is how we accomplish this.