I recently upgraded one of my laptops to Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” and I have had the pleasure opportunity to explore the new Unity user interface for GNOME. Immediately I was annoyed when I noticed that my keyboard shortcuts for switching workspaces (ALT+F1, ALT+F2, etc) were defaulted to several dedicated commands in the Unity shell. This was frustrating because the standard GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts were overlapping with these Unity based commands. So after a bit of digging on on the intertubes, here is how you can disable the ‘Run A Command (ALT+F2)’ in the Unity shell:

On a command line:

$ sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
$ ccsm &
  • Select ‘Category > Desktop > Ubuntu Unity Plugin’
  • On the ‘Behavior’ tab, click the button to the right of the “Key to execute a command” text.
  • Uncheck the ‘Enabled’ checkbox and click the ‘Ok’ button.


One Comment on “Disable ‘Run A Command’ in Ubuntu 11.04”

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  1. Paul says:

    Thanks for this tip! I use Alt-F2 for switching to desktop-2 and Unity was combining that with the run command, which I can do without.

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