Fix Alt Tab task switching in GNOME Shell

by
on
March 20, 2011

If you are using GNOME Shell with the latest Gnome 3 you may be wondering why you cannot Alt+Tab through your running applications. This is especially important since the panel and task bar no longer exists, making switching between applications especially difficult. To enable task switching with Alt+Tab you must configure metacity to support this with gconf-editor.

Hit Alt+F2 and type gconf-editor.

Now navigate to the switch_windows key binding.
apps -> metacity -> global_keybindings -> switch_windows

The default value is set to Disabled. Change this to <Alt>Tab instead. Now exit the editor and task switching should be enabled.

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2 Comments
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  • rosch

    For me this was broken in a quite funny way.
    The switch_windows key was set to a list type like so [Tab].
    Pressing Tab did nothing though. This was after today’s update (4 May 2012).
    Adding a new key with the same name switch_windows and setting the value of type String to Tab gave me back the switching windows functionality.

    This is quite bad that an update is killing important keyboard shortcuts :-(
    Also all my personal shortcuts were gone, luckily I wrote a script a long time ago to set those all in one run with gconftool-2.

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