Quick Launch Looking Glass

Today I took the plunge into something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time: help developing Open Source Software. I’ve started off small :) I’ve been messing around with gnome-shell and looking into how extensions work. What better way to start than scratching and itch? I found it annoying to press Alt+F2 followed by “lg” and Enter to open Looking Glass (Gnome 3’s integrated debugger and inspector tool) all the time.

Now I’ve created a small extension which binds opening Looking Glass to a keyboard shortcut for Gnome 3.2.

To install: download Quick Launch Looking Glass and install it using gnome-tweak-tool or by extraction it in:

~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/

Followed by a restart of gnome-shell.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to add a new custom key binding for a gnome-shell extension so I’ve used the reserved “run command 9” by Metacity until I figure out something better.

If you haven’t bound it already - here is an example on how to bind it to the key F12:

gconftool-2 -s --type string "/apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9" 'F12'

If the extension is enabled then Looking Glass will open when you press F12 (just close it by hitting Escape like normal).