TOPIC: MUTTER
Sorting out hogging of the Super (or Windows) Key by GNOME Shell
12th November 2013Most of the time, GNOME Shell's use of the Super (or Windows) key on a standard keyboard to open up its dash area is no issue and is a handy counterpart to what you might do in Windows, especially in its latest incarnations. However, it does cause trouble if you are using a VirtualBox virtual machine with Windows installed in there. While VMware Player is immune to this problem, I thought that I would see if there was a workaround for it.
Though the issue might arise from VirtualBox's non-grabbing of the Super key like others, a solution can be found in GNOME itself. Opening up dconf-editor and navigating to org > gnome > mutter. In there, you will find a setting called overlay-key and this can be changed. One option is to delete the SUPER_L value and leave it that way. My own preference was to set it to a different key and, to accomplish that, I needed to know what the various key identifiers were. To get these, I ran the following command (just replace any quotes with alternatives in the shell before executing this):
xev | grep -A2 --line-buffered '^KeyRelease' | sed -n '/keycode /s/^.*keycode \([0-9]*\).* (.*, \(.*\)).*$/\1 \2/p'
This opened up an Event Tester window that will need to be closed when testing is complete. More importantly, the aliases for any keys that were pressed are issued to the terminal session so you can see what's what. Initially, the one for the Alt Gr key appealed to me, and I set "ISO_Level3_Shift" as the value of the overlay-key property in dconf-editor. When that didn't work, I set the value to "Menu" and it behaved as expected. While this will mean that context menus will have to be accessed by right-clicking in a Windows session, that is what I do anyway, so there will not be much of a loss in what I have done. Though a function key might have been another option, I reckon that the context menu key will do me.