Keybinding GTK to shifted numbers

GTK (and I think QT also) has a fairly intuitive system for binding keys to commands: Control 3 is just "<Ctrl>3". However when you want to bind a key with Shift, things get tricky. I had tried "<Ctrl><Shift>3", and "<Ctrl>#", and "<Ctrl><Shift>#", all without success.

To make this particular keybinding work, you have to use the special X11 keysym name for that key. I found permanent url that describes these keys here, and a better list with printable characters here.

So for my example, the proper binding would be "<Ctrl><Shift>numbersign".

However keybindings like this are very tricky and shouldn’t be used in production applications (this example is a personal plugin for GEdit). This is because keyboards in other countries have different symbols over different numbers. So it’s not a given that Shift-3 is the same as numbersign in every country.

On The Boogiedownload — behind the scenes

A while back, Nick over at Beantown Boogietown asked me for a mix to post on his website, and recently I put something together that I thought was worthy of publication. Nick went all-out, doing a little mini-interview and giving the mix a very flattering review.

Check it out.

I do want to get one more thing on the record: although I didn’t have a preset tracklist, this isn’t a one-take mix. I did go back and rerecord a few of the transitions that drifted a little. If I was in the middle of a mix and things started trainwrecking a bit, I stopped everything, rewound the outgoing track to the breakdown, and redid the transition. I did that twice. And then when I listened to the recording I discovered nine or ten minutes of the recording was doubled up, making it unlistenable, so I had to go back and rerecord that section too.

I took these four or five pieces into Ardour and spliced them carefully together. I know, the magic is ruined, etc etc. Sorry. I was just really glad that the messed-up section wasn’t the whole last 40 minutes of the mix instead of just the two tracks.