During my last post I discussed about assigning keyboard shortcuts to switch workspaces. At that time, I was unable to assign keyboard shortcuts to switch to Workspace 3 and 4. After little more trial and error, I was able to assign shortcuts for these.

Number of workspaces listed in Keyboard shortcuts preferences are driven by meta-city configuration. So even though I added two more workspaces from Workspace Panel applet, the metacity configuration still had number of workspaces defined as 2. That is why additional shortcuts were not even available to configure.

How to update Number of workspaces in Metacity preferences ?

1. Press Alt+F2 to bring up Run dialog box (Similar to Windows+R on Windows)
2. Type gconf-editor, and hit enter.
3. This will bring up Configuration Editor window. If you have ever used Registry Editor on Windows, this will be very familiar, except there are lot less hex/cryptic values
4. Using the left hand side tree structure, navigate to /apps/metacity/general
5. Now in the right hand side panel, you’ll see several configurable items.
6. Click on num_workspaces. Default value would be 2. Click on 2 , edit it to 4
7. Exit out of Configuration Editor.
8. Go back to System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts. Now under Windows Management Category, you should see entries for Switch to Workspace 3 (and 4)

Note : How-To geek article listed below was very helpful. See link below.

Correction : Nov 25, 2009

It is incorrect to say that this works in gnome. It would be accurate to say that this works in gnome when using metacity window manager. It is amply clear from the instructions above that these shortcut keys are honored by metacity window manager only. It was clear to me when I tried gnome-shell window manager in Ubuntu 9.10, where these keyboard shortcuts did not work.

If gnome-shell indeed supports something similar for workspace switching I’ll write another post detailing the instructions. But for now, consider yourself warned.

Update 2 : It turns out there is no need for separate hotkeys needed to switch to other work spaces. Alt+Tab shows the list of all the applications across all the work spaces. Applications in different work spaces are separated by vertical line

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When I moved from Windows to Ubuntu, I was assuming that VirtuaWin keyboard shortcuts would work as is. To my surprise, there were no keyboard shortcut to switch directly to specific workspace. Right click on workspace applet didn’t help, since it only allowed me to configure number of workspaces. Off course, shortcuts to move to next workspace are defined as Ctrl+Alt+Arrow (Depending on specific arrangement it could be right, left , up or down arrow)

To define shortcut to move to specific workspace directly, you need to go to System->Preferences->Keyboard shortcuts. Select Window Management Category. Here one can define the shortcuts. There are entries for Switch to Workspace 1 and Switch to Workspace 2. But both are disabled. It is very easy to assign the shortcuts. Click on the row, and just press the desired key combination. On VirtuaWin, I was used to Alt+<num>, but that was already taken by Firefox to move to specific tab. So I decided to use Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2.

I was able to define shortcut for Workspace 1 and Workspace 2 (Since there are two workspaces defined in the  default configuration). When I created additional two workspaces (2×2 matrix) I am unable to assign shortcuts to workspace 3 and 4. (For now I’m using Arrow based shortcuts to move between the workspaces)