zsombor's lair

There is no secret: I’m a KDE man. True Gnome would get first choice in front of MS alternatives that I was more or less forced to use before. But this is merely acceptance for an alternative and not love. Some say they are both bloated, which has some truth in it considering the vast amount of undocumented gold nuggets they both share.

Take this beauty found by accident: you can set a window shortcut for particular class of application window. Terribly useful since normally I have the following windows always open Emacs, Firefox, Konsole, Thunderbird windows open. I write the Ruby in one, eyeball test the result in the browser and do all sort of CLI magic in the other (sorry eshell you are too good for me). So how do you switch between them quickly with minimum effort? Here is what I have:

Win+F

Bring Firefox on top

Win+E

Switch to Emacs

Win+K

Konsole will have the focus

Win+T

Read my mail

You might have guessed these are custom shortcuts. For setting them now you’ll need to dig deep into KDE. First go to the application window menu usually accessible by clicking on the top left corner. Select Advanced/Window Shortcut:

And set your shortcut:

It even works across desktops! That is until you close the window, and all settings are lost. But if you are already addicted don’t worry a permanent solution exists: select Advanced/Special Application Settings:

You’ll be able to modify all windows of certain class, that is belongs to a given application. Permanently!