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orschiro
Asked: 2015-10-08 02:17:14 +0800 CST

How to backup/restore system custom keyboard shortcuts?

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Is it possible to backup the custom keyboard shortcuts and restore them when doing a fresh install?

backup

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Gnome-Control-Center (used by Unity and Gnome Shell) stores its key bindings in the per-user Dconf database directories /org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/ and /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/ (source).

    • The easiest way to keep them across system re-installations is to keep the per-user configuration directories (~/.config or more specifically ~/.config/dconf/user for Dconf only). Most of the time it's not necessary or desirable to purge the per-user configuration files anyway.

    • If you can't or won't keep your old Dconf database you can use the dconf command to export (“dump”) parts of it into a file and import (“load”) it later. The relevant Dconf directories are

      • /org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/ for pre-defined shortcuts and
      • /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/ for custom, user-defined shortcuts.

      The following example saves the above Dconf directories to two files keybindings.dconf and custom-keybindings.dconf and then restores them from the same files:

      dconf dump '/org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/' > keybindings.dconf
dconf dump '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/' > custom-keybindings.dconf

dconf load '/org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/' < keybindings.dconf
dconf load '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/' < custom-keybindings.dconf

    If you find that you export your keybindings often, it might be convenient to script the required steps.

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