XBindKeys For Linux

XBindKeys is an open source and freely distributed command-line software implemented in C and designed to associate mouse buttons or keyboard keys to shell commands under any Linux kernel-based operating systems.

With proper configuration, users will be able to use XBindKeys to start many Linux shell commands, just by using their keyboard or the mouse buttons. For example, you can start an xterm session using the CTRL+ALT+X key combination.

The software can display the actual keybinding, set a specific X11 display to use, give users detailed information about XBindKeys when it is executed, as well as to identify a pressed key (see the next section for more command-line options).

Just like any other command-line software, XBindKeys comes with various options. These and the usage message can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘xbindkeys --help’ command in a Terminal app.

Among these, we can mention the ability to use an alternative guile configuration file, to pull either of the guile or rc configuration files for updates, to identify multiple keys pressed, to set the size and position of the window, or to not start as a daemon.

Installing XBindKeys on a Linux distribution is quite easy, but first you need to download the source package from either Softpedia or the project’s website. Save the archive on your Home directory and unpack it.

Open a terminal emulator app, go to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/xbindkeys-1.8.6), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install XBindKeys system wide. To uninstall it, use the ‘sudo make uninstall’ command in the source directory where you’ve compiled the app.