Customizing key bindings

You can customise keybindings in the ~/.config/astroid/keybindings file.

For instance by default, by pressing the L key, you'll notice it's bound to main_window.search_tag. Redefining this binding to a new key (e.g. /) is possible with adding this in the keybindings file:

main_window.search_tag=/ 

You can get a list of all keybindings by running the devel/get_keys.py script. You can use the stdout from this script as a template for your own keybindings file: $ devel/get_keys.py > keybindings. Remember to only keep the lines that you actually change.

See here for an example keybindings file that tries to emulate Sup and Vimium (c for compose, J/K for tab switching, etc).

Empty lines and lines starting with # will be ignored.

Unbound targets

There are also unbound targets (actions that do not have keybinding by default) that you can bind to keys, these are for instance:

# thread view
thread_view.forward_inline=f
thread_view.forward_attached=M-f

# thread index
thread_index.forward_inline=f
thread_index.forward_attached=M-f

this example will overwrite the default keybinding f which forwards a message inlined or attached depending on the configuration option mail.forward.disposition. In this particular example the configuration option no longer has any effect, and you choose whether to inline or attach a message depending on the keybinding.

Read on to find out how to run custom scripts on keypress and integrate them with Astroid: User defined keyboard hooks.

Available Bindings

The key bound can be any combination of the modifiers 'C-' (control), and 'M-' (Meta) followed by either a single unicode character (e.g. '?', 'F', 'a') or a GDK keysym as defined in gdkkeysyms.h without the GDK_KEY_ prefix. Note that this is case sensitive. So 'BackSpace' is a valid key to bind, but 'backspace', and 'GDK_KEY_BackSpace' are not.

Unbinding

To unbind keys put nothing after the '=' sign, for instance

thread_view.search_tag=

would bind that to nothing, making searching-by-tag an inaccessible action from within astroid