You might have noticed that Plasma keyboard shortcuts have been changing recently with the aim to have everything KWin/Plasma be Meta+Something.

Now, I tend to redefine most of the default shortcuts, so this didn’t affect my workspace directly, but I liked the idea to have different modifiers used depending on the category of /thing/ for which I’m creating a shortcut.

An additional aim I had is to have a common shortcut ‘body’ for equivalent actions in different categories, in order to more easily build muscle memory with my new shortcuts.

Categories that I have are:

  1. system (Plasma and such)
  2. terminal application (Konsole, Kitty)
  3. terminal multiplexer (TMux)
  4. specific application (Firefox, Vim, …)

And these are the modifiers I’m trying out:

  1. system: Meta+Anything and Alt+Special keys
  2. terminal application: Ctrl+Shift+Anything
  3. terminal multiplexer: nothing special yet, just the Ctrl+d as the leader
  4. specific application:
    • working with tabs: Ctrl+Anything
    • other shortcuts: Alt+Normal keys

So, for example, the ; and ' as the shared shortcut /bodies/ mean the following in different categories:

  1. Meta+; and Meta+' – switch to next and previous window (I’m using Krohnkite for tiling, so this is not like Alt+Tab, but moving through the visible tiled windows);
  2. Ctrl+Shift+; and Ctrl+Shift+' – would mean switch to next and previous panes in the terminal application (I’m not using this yet, as I don’t tend to use split views in terminal except in TMux);
  3. Ctrl+d ; and Ctrl+d ' – move to next and previous panes in TMux;
  4. Alt+; and Alt+' – move to next and previous panes in an application (currently only in Vim and Neovim).

So far, the approach seems to work Ok. I’ve quickly got accustomed to the new window/pane navigation shortcuts.

The main problem are the programs that don’t allow changing shortcuts (Firefox for example) or don’t allow creating shortcuts with some key combinations (using Ctrl+; in Vim or Neovim does not work, while it works with Alt).

Because of those limitations, the modifiers are not as clear cut as they ideally would be. Ideally, each category would have its own single modifier, instead of, for example, having a mix of Alt and Ctrl in the /specific application/ category, and using a modifier combination like Ctrl+Shift for the /terminal application/.

I’ve also redefined all my Plasma and KWin shortcuts to be location-on-keyboard-based, but more on that later.