SUMMARY For many years I’ve been using Meta+letter shortcuts to launch various applications. Among them: Meta+G = Gwenview, Meta+I = Gimp, Meta+K = Konsole and so on. For a longer while now, two of them stopped working (there may be more applications affected, I just haven’t assigned them). They are kate and Libreoffice, which were assigned to Meta+W and Meta+O, respectively. Over the last weeks and months I repeatedly tried removing and reassigning the shortcut both in the menu editor and in system settings’ shortcut module. I tried removing ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc and I even tested it with a brand new user account, in order to rule out config cruft in my existing account. Nothing helped. STEPS TO REPRODUCE Method one: Menu editor 1. Right-click launcher widget in the panel, select Edit menu items 2. Filter for Kate, select it and go to the Advanced tab and set a keyboard shortcut 3. Save the setting (Ctrl+S) 4. Press the shortcut Method two: system settings 1. Open system settings 2. Go to shortcuts 3. Add application (button at the bottom left) 4. Select kate 5. Add a custom shortcut on the right 6. Apply 7. Press the shortcut OBSERVED RESULT Nothing happens, Kate is not launched. EXPECTED RESULT Kate should start. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.25.4 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.97.0 Qt Version: 5.15.5 Kernel Version: 5.19.3-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz Memory: 30.8 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 4600
Additional Info: The problem is definitely not the shortcut itself. I just assigned Meta+W (my usual kate shortcut) to kcachegrind and it worked right away. On the other hand, assigning a different one to kate (like Meta+G, which is my usual Gwenview shortcut) had no effect. Another evidence that the shortcut itself is working, but not the launch part: if Meta+letter is not assigned to a shortcut and I press it, the letter appears in whatever input widget is currently focused. Once assigned to kate, the letter does not appear anymore, but obviously Kate does not open.
For the affected apps, can you attach their .desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications? I think I might know what's going on, but I need to see the .desktop files to be sure.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #2) > For the affected apps, can you attach their .desktop files in > ~/.local/share/applications? I think I might know what's going on, but I > need to see the .desktop files to be sure. Unfortunately, I don’t have any desktop files at that location for those two applications. One more factoid: I have three machines, all running the (almost) identical KDE-based Arch linux setup. Yesterday I noticed that the shortcuts work on my laptop. Muscle memory dies slowly when trying to launch a text editor. Well now I am totally unsure whether they didn’t work there before or when they started working again. Per-maybe-haps it was fixed with the recent upgrade to 5.97? Anyways. Now, only one machine remains affected.
On the affected machine, is the kglobalaccel daemon not running?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #4) > On the affected machine, is the kglobalaccel daemon not running? Yes: $ pgrep kglobalaccel 1093 16940 This is also backed by the fact that other shortcuts work, it’s only Kate and Libreoffice Start Center that I can’t get to launch. And I just discovered a new interesting tidbit: I wanted to assign Meta+O (usually for libreoffice) to another Program. I opened the menu editor, selected Okular, clicked on the assignment button and pressed Meta+O. I get asked whether I want to reassign. I click yes. but the shortcut button now says “None”. The reassignment only works if I remove the shortcut from its current assignment manually. The same goes for Meta+W, but *not* for example for Meta+G, which is one of the still working shortcuts.
Ah this is Bug 440507 which is already fixed in 5.98. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 440507 ***
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #6) > Ah this is Bug 440507 which is already fixed in 5.98. I hope you’re right. I was aware of that bug, but since gwenview’s Exec line also contained arguments, I thought I was experiencing a different problem.
Only certain types triggered it, weirdly. But let's see if that's the fix. If not, we can re-open the bug.