GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts

While GNOME is mostly a mouse-driven desktop environment it also supports a great number of keyboard shortcuts that make using applications and the system much easier and more productive. These shortcuts are particularly useful for users who wish to be more free from their mouse and are not comfortable using a cursor menu.

Some of the gnome keyboard shortcuts can be found in the system settings where you can assign an action to any key combination you want. The “applications” category handles quick buttons for launching applications, the “menu” shortcuts control the actions you can do with a menu, and the “standards” shortcuts handle standard functions that are usually handled by the command line (Ctrl + C copies text to the clipboard, Ctrl+V pastes copied text from the clipboard to the cursor point, etc).

You can use the Super key on your keyboard (the key that has a logo on it) to open the activities overview in GNOME. This makes it easy to start any application. GNOME Shell uses dynamic workspaces, which means that you can open multiple windows within one session without having to close and reopen the Activity Overview. You can also move a window from one workspace to another by pressing the keyboard shortcut: Super + w or Super + m.

The arrow keys are important for navigating dialogs, which are typically used to configure or customize the program you are using. The arrow keys can be used to move to the next or previous tabbed section of a dialog, and they can also be pressed in conjunction with the shift key to reverse the navigation direction.

GNOME makes good use of the arrow keys in order to quickly resize windows. You can press ++ and ++ to increase or decrease the size of a window, and you can press ++ to completely resize a window. The arrow keys can also be used to reposition the window within a pane of a larger application. For example, the Nautilus file manager is a paned window that can be positioned with the arrow keys.

While the arrow keys can be used to select files in a file manager, the shift key is an even more useful tool for selecting consecutive files. In GNOME and KDE4 most programs that can be launched with a shortcut support the shift key to select multiple files, but this isn’t always true for third-party software.

Keyboard shortcuts can be an extremely handy tool for navigating an operating system, and the gnome keyboard shortcuts are a good place to get started. Most of the shortcuts are well-known and standard across operating systems, but there are a few extras that can make your life a little easier.

Remember to be careful when assigning keyboard shortcuts in the gnome system settings, as you may accidentally change some default functionality that may not be to your liking. If you have made a mistake and aren’t happy with your new keyboard shortcuts there should be an option in the system settings to reset them all.