Keyboard shortcuts not working anymore in xfce

Solution 1:

This looks like it could be bug #1292290 - Window manager keybindings don't work after reboot. A workaround is mentioned there:

I found a workaround: clear before reassign!

To make a shortcut to work ok, select an action you want to reassign and click 'Clear' button until it will really empty. Sometime if there is some (hidden?) duplicates, you will still see some shortcut (the same or different), even you clicked 'Clear' button. In this case just click the button again. Since the action shortcut is really empty, just assign your custom one as usual, and it will work ok :)

and

Someone on #xubuntu or #ubuntustudio (can't remember) mentioned a workaround for this:

You simply have to delete the current key mapping twice before setting a new one. Then the new mapping will be stored in the config.

Solution 2:

This seems to still be an active issue. I found a solution for Studio Ubuntu 14.04 that should work for other xubuntus:

1. Set your file manager to "show hidden files"
2. Navigate to ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/
3. Open xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml in a text editor

Look for two lines:

• <property name="<Alt>Tab" type="empty"> should be first
• <property name="<Alt>Tab" type="string" value="cycle_windows_key"/> has to come after that

You could search on "Tab" to locate these more quickly. If either of these are missing or they are out of order or the wrong value is assigned, then the Alt-Tab function will not work. Fixing a missing value assignment got my computer working right again. (I had disabled Alt-Tab while working with Inkscape and could not get it back again until I did this).

Be careful in there! You might want to make a backup before fooling around in this file

Solution 3:

After suffering from the same problem for months (yes, xmodmap is to blame), I have finally found a workaround:

setxkbmap -option will reset the state of the Alt key.