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I am wondering how can I make a complex multi-key combination like say, Ctrl+Alt+T into a shortcut to execute me a process,xterm for instance? The important caveat is that I want it wired into either X itself or at an even lower level of abstraction. The reason is that I want it to work across display- and window managers, desktop environments and their own input event stacks, also because I don't want to customize each and any of them to produce the same behavior.

I have noticed there are a lot of questions pertaining to input in UNIX/X but most of them deal with remapping/fixing single exotic keys or I end up with xbindkeys tool. Am I really left with no other choice? No XkbOptions wizardry to the rescue? Or .Xresources maybe?

I'll repeat again - I know of countless ways to actually do what I ask for in say GNOME or OpenBox, but I have gotten tired of learning new tricks for the same old thing, and in particular of having to duplicate the behavior with different mechanisms. Ideally, this would be something X can do alone.

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Why not xbindkeys? That's exactly its job. – Gilles Nov 21 '11 at 23:35
That's what I ended up doing. It does the job alright ;-) But somehow I still have the feeling that X is missing a better keyboard protocol extension - one that can deal with multi-key combinations without one ending up with another daemon. That said xbindkeys is great, I am planning to extend it to support shared library calls. – amn Nov 22 '11 at 11:25
@Gilles Exactly - I think you should add this as an answer. – rozcietrzewiacz Dec 14 '12 at 11:38

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