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I think all of us had faced the problem with shortcut conflicts and the irritating trouble of finding unique shortcuts for all applications and remembering them. My idea tries to address that issue.

I know the description is a bit long winding but hopefully it would still make sense.

To put simply the idea is to put different shortcut in different "shortcut context". So a user can use the same shortcut for two purposes by using two different contexts. So Ctrl+N, when I'm on my IDE context would mean one thing and something completely different for amarok giving both application the ability to use the best shortcut possible.

Now all of this is meaningless if switching context is a cumbersome process. So here's the simplified model for context switching.

Firstly let us identify why we may use shortcuts. I have identified three, add more scenario if you think of something different.

1) Windowing, Activity and such operations. Mostly KWin shortcuts for KDE, you need them to manage other things. This is your main-context always present in the background.

2) Application context, this is the context used by your active application like a browser or editor you are using. This is your app-context

3) Application that you want to access without taking focus or other shortcuts like launchers. A background application would be amarok (mostly) .. where you may want to manipulate tracks without giving it focus, or launch a program or some shell script etc. This is your background-context.

Now how to switch between them, making an application foreground makes it the active context. There would be one short to toggle between main and app context which could even be a single key like pressing and releasing "Win" would switch them.

The background context will have a shortcut which activates it and you can use it then to do the background activities. The reason this requires an active shortcut where main & app just toggles because they are more frequent (or I would think they are).

Even though using the main context now requires first to switch to that context because once switched its an exclusive context you can use very simple shortcut for frequent operations making it actually cheaper. So use 1,2,3,4 for desktop switching and F1, F2, etc. for switching app to desktop no more pressing Alt and stretching your fingers to reach the other key for most common operations.

The background context could have its own shortcut but given that they are mostly few in number and could easily be user defined they are generally the problem. The primary focus of this idea is that when using an application in foreground you would be use all its shortcuts without any fear of conflict with another app/WM.

I hope this make sense to others. If this exact idea proves to be cumbersome I would hope at the least inspire some new ways to manage the shortcut overlapping issue.

[Thanks to ZombieBear to help me in hashing out this idea more clearly in #kde ]

Great idea. My first thought was that this would make things even more complicated, but it got clear that it could make everything simpler when I read the whole description. This should really be implemented.

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