[ILUG] running commands with shortcut keys in kde

[Stephen Reilly]

>  Already done, and X has everything prepared for me.
And it still won't work? KHotKeys is what is run when you go through
the KControl menu. You can run it from a shell within X by typing
khotkeys. There is an option in there to disable the daemon under
general settings, make sure that's not selected. You should see
khotkeys as a running process if the daemon has been started
(different in newer incarnations of KDE but in 3.1 it still ran in
it's own process). Try configuring a new shortcut through the KControl
and then pressing the relevant button. As in AFAIK when you configure
a new shortcut the daemon is automatically started but KDE may be
configured not to start it again when you restart X. So if it works in
the same session as a new mapping is configured then this was your
problem.
 
> > You can use xev to find out the keycodes if you have to do it by hand,
> > then xmodmap to map the results. Also rather than mapping directly to
> > xmms functions you could write a couple of shell script wrappers (ask
> > Karl for help with this ;) and sanitise or expand the functionality.
> > You can call these through the KHotKeys daemon.
> 
>  OK....so...how is KHotKeys run ? I don't see such a binary on my box. I
> can see the binary 'khotkeys' running - surely there is a GUI that'll
> collect them for me ? Or even a config file I can edit somewhere ?
It's a daemon. If you haven't disabled it it should already be running
after you configure a hotkey. If not type khotkeys in a shell, press
enter and then check running processes.
 
>  Aha. strace says it loads a /home/looney/.kde/share/config/khotkeysrc
> file. Hmm. Good thing KDE is so easy to configure!
Only when it works first time.

> John
Stephen