i3, XF86 multimedia keys and xdotool

16 Apr, 2018

Chromium (and Google Chrome) does not let you change the default keyboard shortcuts. Because they decided to remove backspace as a go back in history because it was confusing, the only shortcut left to navigate back is Alt+Right.

Alt is my Mod key and I prefer to navigate between windows with arrows, therefor i3 overwrites Chromium's Alt+Right shortcut.

There are extensions to change keyboard shortcuts, but they all work as injecting scripts to every page. Sometimes it doesn't work and it adds a bloat. My solution was to bind $mod+b to XF86 keyboard shortcut using xdotool. I'm sure there is a better way but I prefer this to adding extensions to my browser.

bindsym --release $mod+b exec --no-startup-id xdotool key --clearmodifiers XF86Back