How to find which program took up a hotkey combination in ubuntu (16.04)?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 16.04.

Currently I need to use a hotkey (Ctrl + ;) in one of my program (IntelliJ Idea). But I found that it is taken by another program which I could not identify which is it.

This hijacking program 's behaviour is to display a list of clipboard history near the cursor. But there is no information shown about the program name. This is a very brief list.

Is there a way to show which process is hijacking / intercepting a hotkey combination in Ubuntu? I did research and found some software called Hotkey Explorer but it only have windows version.

(Additional Information)

I recall that a few month ago I installed several clipboard managers. I ended with Glipper but may still have other software remain installed. There was quite a bunch software I tried so I could not recall the name of the clipboard manager.

Answer 1

Under System>Preferences, there should be a Keyboard Shortcuts option (Location and names are just a guess as I am not an avid Ubuntu user, but this concept should exist somewhere). Look to see if your specific key combination is assigned to anything in there.

Another option is: If you suspect that another program is using that hotkey combination, then that program is actively running in order to listen for that combination.

Open a terminal and type: ps -ef, look for anything in that list that may resemble a previous clipboard program that you may have installed (don't worry about entries you don't recognize, the name of the programs we are looking for should be recognizable). Grab the name and remove it from your package manager, or do a kill on the PID and test your hotkey again. If you see more than one program in the list that is a clipboard manager, test your hotkey combination after killing each one to narrow down the exact program.

Run the following command for a more truncated output: ps -ef | awk {'print $2,$8'}, take the number you see in front of the process name and run kill 27002 (replace 27002 with the actual number you see. Ultimately you will need to uninstall the actual package otherwise it will probably run again on next boot. If you are still struggling, paste the output of that ps -ef and someone should be able to recognize which programs it may be and let you know.