BrT

Gnome has a button that you can add to a panel to show/hide the desktop, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to bind that action to a key. Today I learned about the wmctrl program, which can perform many window-manager operations, so I put together this simple script which toggles the “show the desktop” state:

#!/bin/bash
# Toggle the "show the desktop" state.
# Diego Zamboni, Jul 23, 2007

STATE=`wmctrl -m | grep -c 'showing the desktop.*ON'`

if [[ $STATE -eq 1 ]]; then
OPT="-k off"
else
OPT="-k on"
fi

wmctrl $OPT

To map this to Ctrl-F11 (I would have used F11 as in the Mac, but that’s frequently bound to full-screen mode in applications) using xbindkeys, I added the following lines to my $HOME/.xbindkeysrc file:

#Toggle "show desktop"
"toggle_desktop_hide.sh"
m:0x4 + c:95
Control + F11