So for the past two days I have had this problem in Evolution, my email client, where ‘m’ was the new shortcut for add attachment.. Not Ctrl+M but just M. So everytime M was pretty it would stop what I was typing and open up the add attachment dialogue box, obviously making it impossible to write an email with any word containing the letter m in it. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to change the shortcut keys for these sorts of things but today I just randomly stumbled upon it and thought I would share.
What you do is with a new email open go into the insert menu (alt+i) and use the arrow keys to highlight(but don’t press enter) then with the command select press your hotkey combination. Or in my case I simply press the ‘m’ key with add attachment selected and then it bound m to that action.
It’s an awesome way to handle shortcuts but there is a distinct lack of documentation on it so hopefully this article will find its way onto some google searches of people with a similar dilema.


#1 by Mahalingam R on February 1, 2010 - 6:02 am
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Hello,
This is awesome..You saved my day.
Somehow the shortcut for toggling to “HTML” mode was assigned to key “N”. I was not able to type “n” in the composer. I spent almost a day trying different things. Your article has helped to come out of this problem.
Regards,
Maha
#2 by untitled on April 25, 2010 - 6:46 am
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“It’s an awesome way to handle shortcuts but there is a distinct lack of documentation on it so hopefully this article will find its way onto some google searches of people with a similar dilema.”
It certainly did!
#3 by TG on June 21, 2010 - 8:26 pm
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Wow! I thought either I or my computer was going crazy. Even contemplating re-building the entire system after my “L” key started playing up in Evolution. Thanks for the info.
Thumbs up to Evolution for allowing this easy configuration of shortcut keys.
Thumbs down to them for not documenting it.
Double-thumbs down for allowing single keys (like M or L) to be set as a shortcut key without requiring Ctrl or Alt etc. Who does that? At least display a warning, or a confirmation that you’ve changed a short-cut key, anything!!
Anyway, I’m happy (and sane) again.
#4 by bernd on December 21, 2010 - 1:43 am
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Now that I know about this feature I wonder why other applications don’t use it as well. Such a quick way to configure shortcuts I’ve never seen anywhere else. I would be happy if it became a standard like ctrl+ins/shift+ins/…
But it was really hard to get to know about it.
Thanks a lot!
#5 by Foz on October 6, 2011 - 2:14 am
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It never worked for me using Debian, not even now with Evolution 3.03.
“Crtl-Return” is an extremely frustrating “feature” of Evolution.
GNOME was meant to be usable!!! help!!!