cannot use F12

[Guus Bonnema]

I run Fedora 26 with terminator 1.91. I run a drop down terminal (guake) for special tasks and use F12 to get to it. On desktops instances with a browser on, I can. Where I have terminator on, F12 produces a '~' sign in stead of relaying to the overlay of guake.

Is there something I can do to make F12 work again?

Kind regards, Guus.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

I cannot reproduce this with Terminator 1.91 on Ubuntu Artful and Unity 7 desktop. F12 always presents the guake window, even when the cursor/focus is in terminator.

Are you running Wayland (rather than X.org)? If so, it's a Wayland limitation: global shortcut keys no longer work there, they only work over applications that use XWayland (the X Window compatibility layer) and not for native Wayland ones. I assume your browser uses this compat layer, whereas terminator goes native Wayland.

Check for Guake's (as well as Tilda's, they're in the same shoes) bugtracker for the problems they're facing with the global shortcut.

This is by no means Terminator's fault. It is not Terminator deciding to "relay" (as you said) F12 to Guake. It's the desktop environment / window manager deciding to deliver F12 to Guake and not to Terminator (or in case of Wayland, no longer deciding so). The problem should be reproducible with other native Wayland apps too, such as gnome-terminal, gedit etc.

[Guus Bonnema (gbonnema)]

Thank you very much for the clear explanation. Now I can understand what might be wrong. Also, I appreciate the pointer to Guake's bugtracker. I will look into that.

As you said, this is most likely not a Terminator problem. If it is a wayland problem, then I should not be the first to note it.

Kind regards, Guus Bonnema.

[Guus Bonnema (gbonnema)]

I have found a work around that was described in a bug that affects guake but probably originates from wayland. The work around is simple (and I am copying from the issue):

<quote>
I think the problem is GTK2 vs GTK3 shortcuts and how they're implemented (although I could be off-base here, that's just a rank guess). In any case, until this issue is fixed -- for anyone who loves guake and wants to keep using it, do this:

    Open the keyboard shortcuts for your environment (for Gnome, that's Settings::Keyboard::Shortcuts)
    Add a new shortcut named "Toggle Guake", with the command "guake -t", and set the hotkey for it

..this isn't exactly a fix, but it works very well, and it's enabled me to keep using Guake (which I like a lot). This fix is swift and responsive due to guake's nice DBus cli interface. Nice work on that, btw!
</quote>

This seems to work. Pointer to the issue is: https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/492#issuecomment-119075514

Hope this helps for future users of terminator and guake!

Kind regards, Guus Bonnema.

[Guus Bonnema (gbonnema)]

I can confirm that the workaround works.

P.S. I pointed to Wayland, but as the work around states, it might wel be related to GTK.

Kind regards, Guus Bonnema.

[Krzysztof Raczkowski (raczkow)]

How can I use this workaround with Terminator?

[Guus Bonnema (gbonnema)]

You don't. You follow the workaround and then F12 works for all applications, including when Terminator has focus. The problem is not with Terminator. It is with GTK2/3.

[Guus Bonnema (gbonnema)]

I saw this issue is still open. It should not be, but it could have a status that says the problem is with a different system (gtk2/3 in this case).

Maybe add a status for things like this and workarounds that work properly.