Frustration with keyboard shortcut

[rdiez]

First of all, thanks for providing mate-menu.

I have been using Xfce for years, but I am trying to move to the MATE Desktop now. I have written some personal notes about this, search for "org.mate.mate-menu" in this page:

http://rdiez.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Installing_Linux

The first thing I noticed is that, in the menu preferences, "Main button" tab, you cannot assign a shortcut like Ctrl+Esc. It is not hard to find on the Internet many people with this issue, probably because it is a problem in some library/infrastructure component.

But that is the default keyboard shortcut under Windows, and it is burned into my muscle memory. That is why I documented the work-around on my web page above. But I think that such a shortcoming should be mentioned in the official documentation, or at least in the README for this repository. A known issue should not be a surprise, and you should not have to rely on Google to find a solution.

I have recently installed a fresh Ubuntu MATE 18.04, and the Ctrl+ESC keyboard shortcut worked for a few minutes, but not anymore (!). When I press it, nothing happens. Is there I way I could troubleshoot this issue? A similar virtual machine does not exhibit this problem, but my Lenovo laptop does. I have seen on the Internet that the menu keyboard shortcut does not work sometimes, and that this issue also happens in the Brisk menu. But I could not find the reason or a good workaround.

Could anyone provide some hints to help me overcome this issue?

[vkareh]

If you're using Marco, try running this on the command line:

gsettings set org.mate.mate-menu hot-key '<Ctrl>Escape'

For Compiz, this does not work yet.

[rdiez]

Unfortunately, that does not work on my laptop. I am using Marco.

[rdiez]

Is there anyway I can debug what is eating or handling key combination "Ctrl+Esc" incorrectly on my laptop? I looked at all configured keyboard shortcuts in the MATE configuration to no avail. I am looking for some kind of tracing for keyboard shortcuts.

[rdiez]

I just upgraded to Ubuntu MATE 20.04.1 and I am still having the same issue. 8-(

I removed the setting like this:

gsettings reset org.mate.mate-menu hot-key

I then dumped all settings like this:

dconf dump /

Section [org/mate/mate-menu] has no setting "hot-key=xxx" anymore.

Emacs says <C-escape> is undefined, so the desktop is not eating Ctrl+Esc anywhere.

In the menu preferences, under "Main button", option "Keyboard short-cut" reverted to the default "Super_L".

I then tried the usual advice again:

gsettings set org.mate.mate-menu hot-key '<Ctrl>Escape'

Emacs does not say <C-escape> is undefined anymore, it stays quiet. So the new shortcut is being picked up somewhere. The menu preferences show now <Ctrl>Escape, so it knows that this keyboard shortcut has been set. But the menu is still not opening when I press those keys. So it is probably a bug in the menu code itself.

I even tried setting F12 as the keyboard shortcut (just pressing the single key F12), and the menu is still not opening.

[rdiez]

I have hit this issue again with a freshly-installed Ubuntu MATE 22.04.3. Ctrl+Esc worked for a while, and then it didn't anymore.

Is there a command to open the menu programmatically? Somebody asked this question before, but got no answer:

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/invoke-mate-menu-from-command-line-or-shortcut/13028