Question

Is there a way for Java to figure out if there are globally accessible shortcuts defined outside of a java desktop application?

The purpose is for a keyboard shortcut configuration UI, we might warn the user that they are overriding OS shortcuts and might want to choose a different keystroke.

Answer 1

I am afraid that won’t be possible due to:

• Too many different operating systems or desktop environments (as it is the case with Linux)
• Not reachable since they are not stored in plain text

I think your best shot is to define them all (or at least the very important ones). After all the list of short cuts are available. I also found Table of keyboard shortcuts since they give an overview of the shortcuts over different operating systems.

For GNOME I found the following question: Where are GNOME keyboard shortcuts stored?

Depending on your distro version, the keyboard shortcuts application
may be called different things in the GUI but on the command line it
should be called ‘gnome-keybinding-properties’. It turns out that this
neat little application brings all of the shortcuts into one
convenient place for users to edit.

Besides, defining shortcuts for your application won’t override the operating system shortcuts, they are just not functional in your application.