Playing with GConf (Was: Re: Emacs-style keybindings?)

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 07:50:31PM -0800 or thereabouts, Jeff Trefftzs wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 13:24 -0500, Michael R Head wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 17:08 +0100, Chris Rouch wrote:
> My thanks to all of you who replied to my post.  I did manage to track
> down the proper place in the preferences (actually, only in gconf-
> editor, under desktop/dnome/interface/gtk_key_theme) which is, to my
> mind, not an intuitively obvious place to put it.
> 
> Is there an easy way to find out what *all* the gconf keys are, with
> their acceptable values, and what their effects are?  That would be a
> big help.

Here are snippets from a document that never got finished. It's
mostly mine, but this part is actually from my husband. I should 
probably tidy it up and put it somewhere useful. It was written
about a year and a bit ago, so at least two Gnome releases ago;
but it should still be valid. 

This document was about setting and manipulating these on the 
command line: the sort of thing a system adminstrator might want
to do to set up the http proxy for all new users, and so on. 


   You can query these from the command line using gconftool-2
   and you can dump the entire gconf tree with the command 
   "gconftool-2 -R /" if you want to see what it holds. When 
   you try this you will find a large number of strange items in 
   /schema. These describe the types of variable allowed and 
   expected by the programs.

  [...]

  If you want to know the types to use with a given key you can 
  ask gconf.

        gconftool-2 --get-schema-name /system/http_proxy/host

  ...will tell you the name of the schema (the definition of the types 
  accepted by this key), in this case /schemas/system/http_proxy/host

        gconftool-2 -g /schemas/system/http_proxy/host

  ...will display information about the key, including the type and 
  help texts that explain what it does.

Hope this helps. 

Telsa