Obscure behavior of Meta-N shortcut (Gnome Shell)

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Since the beginning of time, I’ve had the Super-N (N=1,…,6) keys bound to “switch to workspace N”. After updating my system via dnf and after rebooting this shortcut behavior has changed: Super-2 opens Evince, Super-3 opens Shotwell, Super-5 opens the Software Manager. Oddly enough, Super-1,4,6 still work correctly for switching workspaces. This completely breaks my workflow.

This same problem has occurred a couple of times in the past, but then I was able to reset by desired behavior by manually setting the shortcuts again in the “Keyboard Settings” again. But this fix no longer works. The Super-2,3,5 shortcuts aren’t documented anywhere, and I don’t know how to disable them. I also tried setting the shortcuts via the dconf editor in org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings but no success either.

Please help!!

Fedora 32, kernel 5.6.18, Gnome shell 3.36.3

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Hello Matthias and welcome to the forum.

This is due to an undocumented “feature” of the shell:

Apparently, you can unset the keybindings either via gsettings or dconf-editor, just navigate to the respective keys and set their values to empty.

Keep in mind that if you are using an extension or some other program that makes use of the same keybindings, it’s first come, first served.

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Hi alexpl,
thanks for the quick reply, that worked! I only had to dig in org/gnome/shell/keybindings.
Very happy to have my desired behavior back, i was already flirting with the idea with getting i3 instead.

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