I recntly upgraded my desktop to Debian Wheezy — I like the description of it on the release page, which says Wheezy is currently in a state called testing. That means that things should not break as badly as in unstable or experimental distributions… Heh.

Anyhow, it ships with Gnome 3 rather than Gnome 2 as the default windowmanager. Which would be fine, as I switched to Xmonad a while back. It actually didn’t seem as terrible as I had been led to believe. Nevertheless, I had a bit of an annoyance using the Nautilus file manager. It used to be the case that pressing delete whilst one had a file selected would, you know, delete it. Now you have to press Ctrl-Delete for some unfathomable reason. It was easy enough to remap it to do something less silly. Here’s how.

• First you need to run dconf-editor. I think it’s under system or something. But it’s easier to just open the terminal and type dconf-editor.
• Open up org | gnome | desktop | interface
• Tick the "can-change-accels" box, this means that you can mess with the default key bindings.
• Then fire up Nautilus and select a file.
• Up in the edit menu, locate select. It has Ctrl-Delete listed as its key.
• Now press the Delete key twice. You need to press it twice. Dunno why. That should reassign the keybinding.
• You might want to switch off "can-change-accels" so you don’t change your keybindings again.