Notes of Rasmus Johanson

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