Tuesday, January 15, 2013

How to Add a Keyboard Shortcut to Open a Terminal in Linux Mint Xfce

Opening a terminal is one of the most frequent activities one does on a fresh new Linux installation, and even on more mature systems, I do like to poke around the terminal on occasion to look at this or that.

In Xubuntu 12.10, you can open a terminal via the keyboard shortcut "super-T."
What does the word "Super" mean? "Super" refers to the Windows key found on many keyboards, located between the Ctrl and Alt key and having a Windows flag on it.
In Linux Mint Maya Xfce, this shortcut was removed. If you click on Menu | Settings | Keyboard | Application Shortcuts, you will find that there is no keyboard shortcut for opening a Terminal window.

However, the good news is we can fix Linux Mint Xfce and restore the missing "Open Terminal" shortcut. After doing a bit of research on the web, I found the command for opening a terminal, and it's not xfce4-terminal, but gnome-terminal.

The precise steps are:
  1. Click on Menu | Settings | Keyboard | Application Shortcuts
  2. Click "Add"
  3. In the command, enter gnome-terminal
  4. For the shortcut, press Super-T and ok, you're done!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. That was helpful but I found trying to do this extremely annoying - smacked wrist linux!- because to finish step 3 you hit the ok button (Enter key) but when you do this a box called "Command Shortcut" opens. But there is no space for you to type in the command shortcut. So what would most people do then? They would hit the cancel button (only option offered!) and the box would close and the shortcut setup would be canceled. Very very annoying and frustrating. And none of the googled linux help pages I found clarified this situation. Really pissed me off I can tell you, and wasted a couple of hours of my time. BTW when the "Command Shortcut" box/window opens you are suppose to hit the keys on your keyboard that you want to use for your shortcut and then hit enter and viola the command shortcut window/box disappears and your new shortcut is in the Application Shortcuts list.

igor said...

I no longer have Xfce on my desktop, so I can't try this out. I do still have it on my htpc, but that's powered off right now. Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps it will help others.

Xfce is probably useful for old machines, but all of my rigs are relatively young. The oldest is a 2008 Thinkpad, and it has 2 Gigs of Ram and a dual-core processor, which is more than adequate for the KDE desktop. It seems to me that much user-friendliness is being sacrificed in order to spare a few dozen kilobytes of RAM and maybe 1% of the cpu. Perhaps it is more of an asset with your single-core semprons and celerons from years ago. However, I do think Xfce remains a good pick for htpc, because user interaction on an htpc is limited to playing media files and typically, little else is done on an htpc. I wouldn't dream of using anything but plain old conservative Xfce for htpc.

Anonymous said...

in Linux mint15 xfce

terminal = xfce4-terminal ( /usr/bin )

thanks.

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much!

Unknown said...

Thank you Kind sir :D

Anonymous said...

Hope you figured it out, but at that point what you do is actually press your shortcut keys. That's what the window is waiting for. Though I agree that the window should explicitly state that.

Anonymous said...

its work right now thx alot sir

Anonymous said...

I tried this with xfce in Mint 16 but you need to enter the command as : xfce4-terminal.
gnome-terminal did not work for me. I also used Ctrl+Alt+t as the shortcut because pressing the Super key opens the menu.

Anonymous said...

For Linux Min 17 do this:


1. Click on Menu | Settings | Keyboard | Application Shortcuts
2.Click "Add"
3.In the command, enter xfce4-terminal
4.For the shortcut, press Ctrl+Alt+t (or anything you want) and ok, you're done!

Adrian Wiik said...

In Linux Mint 17.1 KDE:

Menu -> System Settings -> Shortcuts and Gestures -> Custom shortcuts

Right-click KMenuEdit and click New -> Global Shortcut -> K-Menu Entry

Name your shortcut

(Optional: Write a comment for your shortcut in the "Comment"-tab)

Go to the "Trigger"-tab and make the shortcut combination

Go to the "Action"-tab and select the application to open with this shortcut

Hope this helped KDE users and others!

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