Enable Alt-Shift-Tab shortcut in Ubuntu

Written on January 29th, 2010 at 13:32 pm by shredder12

While working I have a lot of windows open in each of my workspaces. Switching through them can be done easily using the usual <Alt>Tab shortcut but backward switching is disabled by default in Ubuntu. And its pretty hard to work with a lot of windows if you only have one-sided switching. In this tip I will tell you how to tweak your gnome settings to enable this feature.

Open Gconf-editor, either press Alt-F2 and enter gconf-editor or run it as a command in terminal

[shredder12]$ gconf-editor

Now, go to apps->metacity-> global_keybindings and change the value of switch_windows_backward to <Alt><Shift>Tab. This shortcut was enabled for switch_panels_backward by default, so you might want to disable or change it first.

 

8 Comments

Philippe (not verified)
January 30th, 2010 08:31 am
I have tried but it doesn't work for me. Actually if you read the little helps that comes under the keys...it says that you can't use shift because it is used for actually reversing the order of a combination
shredder12's picture
shredder12
January 30th, 2010 10:05 am

Yeah, I read that too. I am not sure why is it not working for you but this is how I made that key comb. work on my system. Did you check if that combination was not already used? In my case it was previously set for switch_panels_backward. If you are using compiz, you might want to check its settings too.

Paul (not verified)
April 12th, 2010 03:54 pm
i had such problem too (Ubuntu junior 9.10) i use several keyboard layout's, and switch between them using key's binding. when key's binding was changed to the problem with was solved. best regards
Anon Linuxer (not verified)
May 17th, 2010 04:51 pm
This works out-of-the-box, no need to touch gconf...
Luis Alvarado (not verified)
July 24th, 2010 06:33 am
Confirmed. On 10.04 at least it works out of the box. Maybe what shredder12 was mentioning was on 9.10
Jewfus (not verified)
January 12th, 2011 02:09 pm
Found it. It did what the good post suggested and still had no luck. Then I went into my keyboard settings which reminded me that I had assigned the combination to swap keyboard layouts. Having changed that to something else - I got tab to cycle backwards through my apps.
william brazz (not verified)
February 6th, 2011 06:38 am
Thanks! ... Works for me.... if I recollect, this wasnt always the case...the shift backwards used to be allowed in earlier versions!
Romwell (not verified)
March 19th, 2011 02:35 am
Following the suggestions of the commenters here, I changed the layout switch shortcut from Alt+Shift to Ctrl+Shift. The Alt+Shift+Tab combo started working after that.

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