I have a problem in that one of my applications uses Shift-F12 but it never gets through. Some googling revealed that it was being grabbed by khotkeys, but I still don't know which specific operation is grabbing it. Is there a way to check in general what commitments there are for a particular key combination - not just for khotkeys but for all the other keyboard definitions? If there isn't, there should be.

Through the KDE control center you can see all the keyboard shortcuts definitions. See section "Regional & Accessibility".

You can configure KDE keyboard shortcuts in the control center (kcontrol). Click on:

control center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts

and then configure the Global Shortcuts the way that you want it to handle Shift-F12.

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Steve Stites

It seems that when it comes to grabbing keystrokes, there are two uncoordinated daemons that provide that facility: the Regions and Accessibility area of kcontrol, and KHotKeys. Shift-F12 is not listed in Regions and Accessibility, but it's still being grabbed, and khotkeys is doing the grabbing.

The behavior I want for Shift-F12 is that it gets forwarded unchanged to the currently active application. There's a not-so-straightforward way to see if R&A is grabbing it: try assigning it to some other operation listed in R&A. It works, but it's not the natural way of doing this. And R&A isn't aware of the khotkeys assignments at all; I can assign Shift-F12 to an R&A action and it won't complain because it doesn't know that khotkeys is grabbing it first.

Determining the khotkeys grabbing is very difficult. I even tried assigning it to something else in the Menu Editor (itself obscurely located) and the existing use, for whatever reason, wasn't picked up. The only way I could figure out to deallocate Shift-F12 was to forcibly remove the reference to it from the khotkeysrc file (which I found out about from another post).

What's really needed is a simple way to determine whether a particular key combination is being grabbed by anyone at all and who is doing the grabbing.

I've tried in vain to locate the docs for khotkeys (I'm running under KDE, of course). man khotkeys doesn't find anything, nor does a search through the KDE docs for khotkeys. Even locate khotkeys doesn't find anything useful.