It seems the
setShortcutmethod is deprecated since KF 5.90
Ohhhh, that’s really good info.
The task switching actions have
Alt-TabandShift-Alt-Tabas the default shortcuts
I am specifically trying to mess with the “in current app” shortcuts, which use the Grave key (Tilde without shift), above Tab. And trying to just move the default shortcuts for that from the “Main” tab to the “Alternative” tab, so that in-app switching can use the thumbnail grid UI while “app” switching (not native to Plasma but enforced by a KWin script called “Application Switcher” that groups “apps” together like macOS) continues to use “Large Icons”.
Thus, from my own perspective, bringing a sense of sanity to app switching in Plasma, similar to how I use it in macOS.
I did see some escaped tabs showing up in kglobalshortcutsrc at one point, but didn’t quite understand what was going on. So that’s how the “active” alternative shortcuts are delimited, and there can be four different active shortcuts, while the shortcut after the comma is the default shortcut that it would revert to? That kind of clears up some part of this, although I normally only want to set a single active shortcut.
The shortcuts for in-app switching in the “Alternative” tab are normally not set to anything by default (showing “None”). And I take the step of setting the same shortcuts in “Main” (well, all of them actually) to be “None”. Still, the result is that in-app switching ends up behaving like the broken task switching in Budgie, flipping between only two windows.
Until I go into the GUI panel and do the “Apply” thing. But all settings in there look absolutely correct before I change some setting and hit “Apply”.
So, the
setShortcutKeysmethod in the D-Bus API works, but still using thekwriteconfig6utility or modifying the configuration files manually look like the intended way of configuring Plasma.
Technically the D-Bus calls work, just like kwriteconfig6, but they aren’t working in the practical sense. It’s bizarre to me that Plasma devs have allowed it to be this complicated to set some shortcuts from a script without needing to log out.
I feel confident that these techniques probably work fine from within an actual Qt app, so maybe nobody is paying any attention to making sure the terminal commands work.
Ultimately there should be some way to do the equivalent of the “Apply” step from a script to fix things, but the usual “reconfigure” command, or variations targeted at different D-Bus addresses as a destination, is not doing the same thing as clicking that “Apply” button.
I hate to try to do things like restarting Plasmashell. That has caused problems in previous testing. Apps not launching anymore after the shell restart.