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I recently installed Ubuntu 17.10, and when I tried to set my keyboard layout to change with alt+shift, I hit a well known bug. There is a workaround, using gnome-tweaks-tool which works, but then it creates an unwanted behaviour on Firefox (perhaps other programs as well).

After setting alt+shift through gnome-tweak-tool as the combination to change language, whenever this combination is pressed within Firefox, it triggers a toggle that Firefox uses to show/hide the Menu Bar (with File/Edit/View etc.), and 'focus' is taken away from wherever the cursor was.

It's very frustrating, because one has to go and click again at the cursor. The only solution I found was to permanently enable Menu Bar in Firefox because then alt doesn't do anything and I can use it to change languages. But I don't want to have Menu Bar on top always.

I hope you can understand what I'm trying to explain.

Any thoughts?

pomsky
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thomas
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2 Answers2

6

Use shift+alt (i.e. shift before alt) in Firefox.

pomsky
  • 70,557
3

I have the same issue with slack, after some digging found out that there is another way to change the keyboard layout w/o using gnome-tweak-tool which wont cause this side effect of losing the focus.

The solution is to use gsettings as explained here

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source "['<Shift>Alt_L']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source-backward "['<Alt>Shift_L']"
pomsky
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Todor
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