Since upgrading from 12.04 to 14.04 I've lost the ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts in Gnome applications such as gedit and meld.
The setting can-change-accels has no effect when enabled using either gconf-editor or dconf-editor. I also tried using the UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gedit command. In gedit, no matter what, I can't set accelerators by hovering over the menus. Manually editing the .config/gedit/accels file has no effect (accelerator is not working), and the file is re-written upon exit of the application (the rewritten file is all-comments). Inside meld, I noticed that you can set the accelerators by hovering, and they work for the duration of the program, but they are persisted nowhere. Upon restart, the old accelerator is in effect. Watching my home dir shows that no configuration files are written when setting the shortcut, neither when exiting the application.
I also tried creating a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file, no effect.
One of the questions I checked out: here
My conclusion so far is that a serious and important feature of Ubuntu 14.04 is malfunctioning beyond repair. I'm only using LT releases but am consistently dissapointed by the fragility of desktop features.
Note: I'm using gnome flashback - metacity login. I never liked Unity because of the inefficiency of the launcher and panels (classic panels are all I need), plus, the left-side button bar makes me think I'm using a phone or a tablet, which I'm not. A second reason is compiz, which was always buggy (memory leaks, overnight crashes), and the reason I upgraded in the first place.
