Export/Import Keyboard Shortcuts on Linux Mint 17/18/19/20 (Cinnamon)


I’ve been looking for this one FOREVER. Love how easy it is to migrate home dirs and config files to a new Mint installation, but one of the things that I could never get right was moving the custom keyboard shortcuts. They just didn’t seem to live in any plaintext configuration files.

I suppose I wasn’t searching for the right things.

Finally found it on this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/cinnamon.

Anyway, here’s how to export the keybindings:

Install dconf-cli first

sudo apt-get install dconf-cli

Linux Mint 17

dconf dump /org/cinnamon/keybindings/ > dconf-settings.conf

Linux Mint 18/19/20

dconf dump /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ > dconf-settings.conf

And to import:

Linux Mint 17

dconf load /org/cinnamon/keybindings/ < dconf-settings.conf

Linux Mint 18/19/20

dconf load /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ < dconf-settings.conf

And finally to export from Linux Mint 17 and import into Linux Mint 17.x:

Export, with the sed conversion, on Mint 17:

dconf dump /org/cinnamon/keybindings/ | sed 's/binding=\(.*\)$/binding=\[\1\]/' > dconf-settings-for-mint.conf

And then import on:

Linux Mint 18/19/20

dconf load /org/cinnamon/desktop/keybindings/ < dconf-settings-for-mint.conf