Using Keyboard Shortcuts with IceWM

Some time ago I wrote a short IceWM tutorial. As you might remember, IceWM is one of my preferred lightweight window managers. It's not too demanding for the system resources and can thus run very well on my rather old computers.



IceWM has so many hidden features that it is not possible to deal with all of them in a single tutorial. One of the features I left out from my tutorial was using keyboard shortcuts for more efficient use of the desktop.

The keyboard shortcuts are configured by the file ~/.icewm/keys. Your distribution might have added some definitions already, or you could copy the default shortcuts from the file /etc/icewm/keys. The syntax used for configuration is pretty evident, just follow the example of the default file.

My settings are rather simple:

key "Alt+Ctrl+t" xterm
key "Alt+Ctrl+e" emacs
key "Alt+Ctrl+f" firefox

Now I can start xterm by pressing Alt+Ctrl+t and Emacs by pressing Alt+Ctrl+e. You should define your own keyboard shortcuts, too