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Guide Beginner Launching Applications With Keyboard Shortcuts.


Trusted User
Founding Member
Nov 23, 2018
With the GNOME desktop environment, you never need to open a single thing to launch apps - No docks, menus, dash, overview or search, and, not even the Pop-Shell Launcher for that matter. GNOME comes with some preset keyboard shortcuts for launching apps. I've made a dozen more custom KBS (keyboard shortcuts) for convenience.

The default ones are:

Super + b = default browser (Firefox for me)

Super + t = default terminal (Alacritty for me)

super + f = default file browser @ $HOME (Nautilus for me)

Super + e = default email (Thunderbird for me)

Super + q closes apps in Pop.

This is the absolute quickest and cleanest way to launch apps, and, they're easy to make! All you need is the exec, the command that can launch the app from a terminal. Try it with gedit, and enter. It's usually just the name of the app, or package name. If not, you can find the Exec= in /usr/share/applications/<name>.

Below you can see Gedit's "exec".

❯❯ cat org.gnome.gedit.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Text Editor
Comment=Edit text files
Exec=gedit %U

Once you know what launches the app in a terminal head over to Settings > Keyboard > Custom Shortcuts > Add shortcut.

Depending on whether it will mess with existing navigation or functional shortcuts, I normally choose either super + <letter> (preferred), or ctrl + shift + <letter>. For example, Marktext is ctrl + shift + m, but Chromium is super + c. This is because super + m toggles windows full screen, and ctrl + shift + c copies things to the clipboard. Vivaldi is ctrl + shift + v, because super + v opens the notifications window. The secret is to be consistent with either super, or ctrl + shift. It gets messy and hard to remember if you use too many different combos for launching.

You can also enable the use of super + <number>, which launches the app in the dash that corresponds with that number. For ease of use, you can use dconf-editor to achieve this. Navigate to /org/gnome/shell/keybindings/ and click to edit any or all of switch-to-application (1 through 9). For example, I have "Settings" in position 5 in the dash ( I use 4 through 8: Gedit 4, Settings 5, Tweaks 6, Screenshot 7, Extensions App 8). I use these consistently on every machine I have. I'm now going to edit "switch-to-application-5". To make it work, just toggle off "Default value". Then in the Custom value field, add the following ['<super>5'], or whatever number / position you want to enable. Done!

You can position things in the favorites dash by dragging them.

Using KBS to launch apps is truly super fast and addictive. Install App = make shortcut.
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