Kglobalaccel grabbing keys it shouldn't

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1

I’ve recently switched back to KDE/Kwin from qtile. Everything is mostly working fine, but some key combinations are being grabbed as if they’re global shortcuts, preventing them from going through to applications. So far I’ve noticed this with the Alt-<, Alt-> and Alt-D keys, commonly used in Emacs-style editing.

As far as I can tell, these keys are not configured as shortcuts anywhere in the configuration. Also, I don’t notice anything happening when I press them. I’ve verified that it is kglobalaccel grabbing the keys, but as best I can tell it isn’t doing anything with them.

Any idea how to fix this?

2

Could you upload your ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc? Thanks!

Also, some people like to configure Alt+Shift for layout switching. Do you have that configured? (Settings->keyboard->layouts)

3

There’s no shortcut configured for layout switching.

Discourse won’t let me upload a text file here, or even a link. Paste, suitably mangled:

pastebin . com /27ePnm55

4

In your settings nothing seems to conflict with the keys you mentioned.

On my end I cannot reproduce on wayland git build – emacs recognizes my alt+d presses (emacs interpret that as M-d, since alt is interpreted as meta in emacs)

Do you happen to use a non-us layout?

Also are you using x11 or wayland? Which version of plasma are you on?

5

I’m using X. The Plasma version is 5.27.11, from the kubuntu-backports repositories (I’m using PopOS, which is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and their native Plasma lacks some of the features I wanted).

I am using the US-Colemak layout. All my reports of keybinds here are relative to that layout; e.g. Alt-D is pressing the physical keys that would be Alt-G under QWERTY.

I’ve found several other Alt- keybinds that get shadowed. Somewhat exhaustive list: Alt-G, Alt-R, Alt-D, Alt-H, Alt-| aka Alt-Shift-\, Alt-Shift-X, Alt-Shift-B, Alt-Shift-K, Alt-Shift-M, Alt-< aka Alt-Shift-,, Alt-> aka Alt-Shift-., Alt-? aka Alt-Shift-/. It may be notable that the entire right half of the bottom row is shadowed under Alt-Shift.

I’ve verified that these keys all work in a VT, so it shouldn’t be any kind of hardware issue.

6

On x11 this is a known issue with multiple layouts: 365255 – On x11, inconsistent behavior with alt+7 under multiple layouts when alt+` is also assigned

7

Huh, okay.

Thinking that might be the issue, I went through and deleted most of the global shortcuts on alt or alt-shift. After doing that, it seems to work.

8

You could also try using wayland, where the issue does not exist, if that is feasible.