Shortcuts being removed from Gnome?

  • Super + right mouse drag: no longer resizes windows
  • Super + D: no longer shows desktop:
  • Super + E: no longer launches Nautilus
  • Ctrl + Alt + T: no longer launches terminal

Tested on Fedora 38 Beta and Ubuntu 22.10. On ubuntu the terminal shortcut works.

Edit: opened issue here

Super + left mouse drag was never used to show the desktop, but to move a window (without having to find a dragable area like the titlebar).

The show-desktop shortcut still exists, but there is no key combination assigned by default. That has been the case at least since 2011 (when porting from gconf to gsettings), I didn’t trace the change further back. The reason is that there hasn’t been anything on the desktop since GNOME 3.0, so the shortcut is effectively a “show my wallpaper” action nowadays.

  • Super + E: no longer launches Nautilus

I don’t think it ever did? There is a “Home folder” action, but it doesn’t have a shortcut assigned by default (other than the hardcoded XF86Explorer that is found on some keyboards).

It’s possible that Ubuntu used to change the upstream settings and assign Super+e, and stopped doing that.

  • Ctrl + Alt + T: no longer launches terminal

Again, I don’t think this was ever the case upstream. There used to be a “Launch Terminal” action with no default shortcut, but it was removed in 2011. There’s no pre-defined physical key for that action either, so there’s no strong reason for having a pre-defined action that doesn’t do anything by default, considering that users can easily define custom shortcuts (which also allows them to pick their default terminal emulator)

Sorry about the typo, I meant Super + Right mouse drag no longer resizes windows.

Any plans on adding such shortcuts as default? I feel shortcuts like opening a terminal and opening a file manager are sensible and universal (even Windows have them).

so the shortcut is effectively a “show my wallpaper” action nowadays

It is way more useful than that. I view it as “minimize all windows” action, where if you have so many windows opened and you want to clear view you just press Ctrl+D then pick whatever window you want to view separately.

I meant Super + Right mouse drag no longer resizes windows.

It never did by default.

You can set

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences resize-with-right-button true

to change that.

Any plans on adding such shortcuts as default? I feel shortcuts like opening a terminal and opening a file manager are sensible and universal

The “Home folder” action exists, it just doesn’t have a default shortcut. Feel free to suggest that on gitlab.

I don’t see us adding a “Open Terminal” action though. It’s not that hard to set up a custom shortcut, and that will launch your preferred terminal rather than whatever default GNOME picks.

It is way more useful than that. I view it as “minimize all windows” action

If that workflow works for you, then nothing’s stopping you from assigning a shortcut to that action. There are certainly no plans for removing it. But just because it is useful to you doesn’t mean that it would be a good default.

Thank you,

Just to clarify, I’m not suggesting adding defaults because they’re “part of my workflow”, but because there are shortcuts for them everywhere (kde, xfce, i3, windows, cinnamon, …)

GNOME is different from those in that it does not really support minimize anyway, so adding shortcuts for minimize would not make a lot of sense. The workflow to “clear view” down to one window is to move the one window to a new workspace.

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