Xfce Forum

Pheeble

Member

Registered: 2015-06-22

Posts: 29

Looking for the 'human friendly' descriptions of keyboard shortcuts

[SOLVED] ... (<-- putting that here because it won't fit in the limited number of characters allowed in the subject title)

I'm using Linux Mint 22.1 XFCE.

I'm writing a small Python utility to pop up a list of all of my active keyboard shortcuts.

The XFCE doc page at https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/keyboard_shortcuts shows a list including descriptions such as "Move current window to next workspace".

That page claims that the list was produced by using the command 'xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -p /xfwm4/default -l -v', but in fact the description produced by that command is "move_window_next_workspace_key".

While that description is comprehensible, I would like to use the more human friendly description displayed in the Keyboard tab of the Window Manager Settings window: "Move window to next workspace".

I started to manually type out the descriptions for  every keyboard shortcut but I quickly realised that would be a slow tedious process. It occurred to me that the descriptions should be available in one of the localisation files somewhere, and I might be able to extract the descriptions more quickly from those files.

I have hunted through my system for any localisation file that might contain a list of those descriptions, but without any luck.

I downloaded the source code for xfwm4-4.20.0, xfconf-4.21.0 and xfce4-settings-4.21.0 from https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce but I could not find anything containing those description text strings there either.

I know they must be somewhere in the XFCE source code but I seem to have hit a wall.

Can someone with knowledge of the XFCE source point me in the direction of the appropriate files so I can at least try to automate an extraction method to get the friendly descriptions of the keyboard shortcuts?

Last edited by Pheeble (2025-09-09 22:06:07)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,189

Re: Looking for the 'human friendly' descriptions of keyboard shortcuts

xfwm4 shortcuts with descriptions are listed here.

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Pheeble

Member

Registered: 2015-06-22

Posts: 29

Re: Looking for the 'human friendly' descriptions of keyboard shortcuts

@ToZ, Thanks!
That's exactly what I was looking for.

I converted that to a Python dictionary and it works well in combination with my custom shortcuts:

Last edited by Pheeble (2025-09-09 23:22:30)