Today I’m happy to announce that for the first time we were able to backport a new feature from our Wayland offerings to X11: modifier only shortcut support. This is one of the most often requested features in Plasma and I’m very happy that we finally have an implementation for it.

Modifier only shortcuts mean that an action is triggered if one clicks a modifier key without any other key. By default the Meta (also known as super and windows) key triggers the main application launcher of your Plasma session. But the implementation is way more flexible and allows to use any modifier (ctrl, alt or shift) as a trigger for an action (currently configuration is only possible through manual modification of kwinrc).

The feature was initially implemented for Wayland inside KWin and has been available for a year already. The tricky part is to recognize when only a modifier is pressed. On Wayland KWin gets all key events and passes them through xkbcommon. Given that KWin knows when a key is pressed and knows when only the modifier is pressed. Thus it was possible to implement modifier only shortcuts.

On X11 our global shortcut system does not have such a deep knowledge about all key states. It only registers to the shortcuts one has configured and in general it triggers on the press event, for modifier only we need trigger on the release event. As our X11 shortcut system relies on key grabbing we couldn’t use it for modifier only support: the chances to break applications are too high.

The implementation we have now on X11 reuses the infrastructure setup for Wayland. It uses XInput 2 to listen to all raw key events (which are also delivered if an application grabs the device) and sends those events through our xkbcommon infrastructure just like on Wayland to recognize the pressed keys.

In the past my main concern was that we mis-detect the state and that we trigger the shortcut when that is not wanted, for the wrong key, etc. etc. Also with the new implementation I have these concerns, although I’m very confident that it works correctly. Nevertheless I want to ask you to give a try to this feature and report if you notice any problems. I’m especially interested in setups which change the meta-modifier position through xmodmap and layout changes. If anything is not working as expected please tell us so that we can have an awesome modifier only experience in Plasma 5.8.

In case you use KSuperKey I recommend to disable that. Otherwise it might happen that shortcuts are triggered twice. At that point I want to thank KSuperKey for having filled this gap in our default feature set and providing a solution for our users who wanted to use this feature.