GNOME used to have lots of problems with regards to keyboard shortcuts( https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=671236 ) but has gotten significantly better so again thank you guys so much for that.

Anyway as can be seen from the linked bug report when I got a chance to test GNOME 3.4 properly some of the issues I've been having disappeared. The key word is some. At the time I thought all the problems were solved but I turn out to have been quite wrong.

Earlier today a lot of weird stuff happened. Let me explain what I was trying to do and describe what went down as best as I can.

While GNOME 3 is great it's not perfect and does spaz out on me at times sometimes totally randomly and other times from causes I will write out some other time as they are kind of silly. For those times I decided to rig the keyboard shortcut Super+r to the command "/usr/bin/gnome-shell --replace". To the best of my knowledge there was nothing else bound to that shortcut in stock GNOME and nor did I bind any other command to that shortcut. Anyway getting back to my point while apparently the shortcut was successfully set up it didn't work.

At first I thought that maybe I typed something wrong in the command but I went back double checked. Yep it was solid. I did my stuff right just let me tell you.

Anyway I thought why not delete it and try again. I did that. No go. Then I tried rigging other things to Super+r things less sensitive such as "/usr/bin/gedit", "/usr/bin/qalculate", etc. For my next few tries at that I kept failing. Apparently setting it up was successful but no luck actually using that.

It only gets stranger because after a few such attempts it did start working and I could launch a of different programs/commands that way. Then I tried making the command "/usr/bin/gnome-shell --replace" and hoping it would work. Nope. Nada Zilch. Fail.

Then I tried another crazy experiment. I was thinking that since for some reason using a binding involving Super for this doesn't work. Why don't I use something involving Ctrl, Alt, Shift, etc. Problem is Ctrl+letter often is used in many programs, so is Alt+letter to navigate menus. I need a more complex combination to avoid problems. Thus I decided to bring down the roof and use the hairy combo Ctrl+Alt+Shift+q to invoke "/usr/bin/gnome-shell --replace" and finally success.

I then thought maybe I could now bind it to Super+r and have it work. Nope no such luck. Then I was like since r stands for referesh/restart/reload/replace let me at least bind that to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-r. Of course at the time I did not realize my fatal mistake. At the time I forgot that that was the thing that stopped and started the screen recorder.

Anyway there was no warning or anything and I was able to set up the binding Ctrl-Alt-Shift-r to restart the shell. It worked once to restart the shell. Subsequent times it would not restart the shell but do its usual screencast recording stuff.

GNOME should have warned me when I tried to assign the restart command to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-r but it did not. Furthermore upon looking further at the keyboard preferences nowhere there is a setting to reassign or disable the binding to start/stop recording screencast action. Hell if it wasn't for the fact that some time previously I read on some obscure section of the GNOME site that screencasts were possible and here is the keybinding I wouldn't even know GNOME could do screencasts. How is a normal user to even know any of this from the obviously visible interface or even the Control Center/System Preferences for that matter?

Please look into this matter. Thank you.