ShortcutsTable of Contents
While most of the functionality offered by Plasma™ can be accessed using a simple “point and click” interface, many people prefer using the keyboard for some tasks. Pressing something like Ctrl+F is often just faster than moving your hands off the keyboard to the mouse, opening the menu and selecting .
As different people have different preferences about keyboard shortcuts, Plasma™ offers full customization of “key bindings.” A key binding or shortcut is a combination of an action with a key or a combination of keys.
Standard shortcuts and Global shortcuts work just the same. Actually, in a certain way standard or application shortcuts are “global” as well. The only difference is:
“Standard shortcuts” refer to actions that are often available in applications, such as Save, Print, Copy etc.
“Global shortcuts” are shortcuts for actions that make sense even when no application is opened. These shortcuts usually refer to actions like switching desktops, manipulating windows etc.
Please note, that the application shortcuts configured here are only the standard actions often found in applications. Most applications will define their own actions as well, for which you have to customize key bindings using the application's key bindings dialog.
At the top of this dialog you see an input box, where you can
search interactively for shortcut names (e.g. Copy) or combination of keys
(e.g. “Ctrl+C”) by typing them literally here.
Below the search box you can see a list of key bindings, i.e. associations between actions (e.g. Copy) shown in the Action column and keys or combination of keys (e.g. Ctrl+C) shown in the Shortcut or Alternate column.
At the left of this page is a list box which allows you to select a Component like KWin, Plasma Desktop etc. The defined shortcuts for the selected component are displayed in the Action and Global column in the list view.
This page has the same search box as the Standard Shortcuts tab.
Use 
or 
to add or remove a component.
Adding a component opens a dialog to pick applications from the start menu structure to add launchers to be usable as shortcuts. If an application has jumplist options they will be available as actions.
Click the File drop down box at the right to import/export a Scheme, set all shortcuts to none.
Global shortcuts can now be configured to jump to specific tasks within an application.
By default you can open the application menu by just pressing the Meta key.
Configuring key bindings is pretty easy. In the middle of these System Settings modules you will find a list of available actions. If there's a key binding configured for that action you will find it in the columns right to it. Just select the action you want to configure.
After you have selected an action in the list you will notice that this item is highlighted and you see two additional check boxes below this item in the list view. There you can configure a combination of keys or maybe no key binding at all for the selected action.
Default: the selected action will be associated with KDE's default value. This is a good choice for most actions, as KDE comes with reasonable key bindings we have thought about.
Custom: if this option is enabled, you can create a key combination for the selected action. Click on the button labeled either or labeled with the previously selected custom shortcut. Now the button label changes to . Then press any modifier key (i.e. Shift, Ctrl, or Alt) and then normal key or a function key (e.g. F11) you want to assign to this key combination.
Clicking on the Alternate column of a row in the list allows to edit the second shortcut for the action.