Xfce useful keyboard shortcuts

Xfce, the uber-cool lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems, is known to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly, but not ever has Xfce useful keyboard shortcuts. It is also a super productive desktop, because you can fit it on your needs, has no bloat, and is fully customizable.

One of the most interesting aspects of Xfce is that it has only basic shortcuts by default compared to GNOME or tiling VM, and also some of the shortcuts are clearly old-school or too windows-like. So, let’s see what can we do with this.

The official Xfce keyboard shortcuts list

We didn’t find it, and we think Xfce does not provide an official and comprehensive keyboard shortcuts list. But we are lucky because Xfce stores its keyboard shortcuts in a single file:

/etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml

Also, you can find a user config file based on distros (the same for Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu at the time of writing) at:

~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml

Usually, the default keyboard shortcuts for Xfce are:

So – easily – you can edit the shortcuts keyboard file and populate it with the default GNOME shortcuts or with the ones you like or prefer.

As an example, something like this:

And especially:

The possible combinations are practically infinite, so the advice is to test the most convenient ones for your personal workflow and then modify the purpose accordingly by applying all the necessary changes to get your super uber Xfce useful keyboard shortcuts.

Also, on the A shortcuts editor for Xfce and a couple of other things page, you can find the freshly released Xfce shortcuts editor to make your work really really simple. Enjoy it.

We hope this article was useful to you, let us know in the comments. Tschüss!