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Too many keyboard shortcuts to remember easily?

Being more of a tap-tap person than a clicky-GUI one, I have a lot of keyboard shortcuts in my head. At last count I had 21 custom shortcuts, plus a few of the many that came with my Xfce desktop, plus within-application shortcuts like Ctrl+k, which toggles the spellchecker in Mousepad text editor.

Most of the time I can remember these, but my senior-age memory isn't as good as my junior-age one used to be. What I needed was a GUI pop-up display with a list of regularly used keyboard shortcuts. The display could be launched with a keyboard shortcut, of course, sort of like a master password to open a file of all my passwords.

I have a text file full of dozens of my passwords. The file is encrypted and I open it in a terminal with an unforgettable password. At least, I hope it's unforgettable.

After reviewing some of the options for GUI pop-ups I settled on Timothy Musson's gxmessage, which is a GNU utility in the repos and is based on GTK2.

It's not a new utility (last update 2014), but gxmessage has several simple features that I really appreciate:

I created a file "kbs" that lists keyboard shortcuts, what they command and what they do. I then wrote a script to launch gxmessage with "kbs" as its target:

#!/bin/bash
gxmessage -bg "#454545" -fg "white" -geometry 1050x550+10+10 -fn "sans-serif 11" -file ~/scripts/kbs
exit 0

The pop-up launches in the upper left of my display with the shortcut Meta + k:

shortcuts pop-up

The gxmessage executable is only 34 KB and has just a few dependencies (below). I might use it in future for other memory-aiding pop-ups!

depends

Next post:
2025-10-10   Four ways to prepend a line of text

Last update: 2025-10-03
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