Openbox: Defining a Keyboard Shortcut

The Openbox Window Manager has quickly become my favorite way to use my computer. It use it almost exclusively on all the machines that I use (Ubuntu at work, Mint at home).

Here I'll describe how to add a keyboard shortcut so that we do not have to reach for the mouse to do something common. As I spend most of my time in the terminal, one shortcut I make the most use of is Alt+T to open a terminal program, mrxvt.

The keyboard shortcuts, along with many other things, are defined in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml. The keyboard element is a child element of the root openbox element. Below is a snippet of an example showing the default shortcut for switching to the desktop to the left. The shortcut C-A-Left describes pressing the Ctrl, Alt, and left arrow keys with the default mappings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc">
  <!-- some config omitted...  -->
  <keyboard>
    <chainQuitKey>C-g</chainQuitKey>
    <!-- Keybindings for desktop switching -->
    <keybind key="C-A-Left">
      <action name="DesktopLeft">
        <dialog>no</dialog>
        <wrap>no</wrap>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <!-- some keyboard config omitted...  -->
  </keyboard>
  <!-- some config omitted...  -->
</openbox>

To add our terminal shortcut, we add a keybind entry with the Execute action, followed by the command to execute. The key of A-t corresponding to pressing the Alt key along with the t key:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc">
  <!-- some config omitted...  -->
  <keyboard>
    <chainQuitKey>C-g</chainQuitKey>
    <!-- my keybindings -->
    <keybind key="A-t">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>mrxvt</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>
    <!-- some keyboard config omitted...  -->
  </keyboard>
  <!-- some config omitted...  -->
</openbox>

We can reload the new configuration from the command line with:

  $ openbox --reconfigure

Or by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Reconfigure from the Openbox menu.

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Note: In order to take the screenshot with the menu shown, I ran gnome-screenshot with a delay of 5 seconds:

  $ gnome-screenshot -d 5

During the delay, you can right click on the desktop to get the menu in the picture.

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