how can I temporarily disable the overview/super key?

[Matthew Miller]

Here's my terrible problem: when playing games, the Super ("Windows") key is
close enough to left-alt that I sometimes hit it. This causes the overview
to come up and the window to be shrunken. This is pretty disruptive. I'd
like to script something to temporarily disable this when running specific
full-screen games.

But I discovered something weird. I went to Settings and found the "Show the
activities overview" setting. This isn't actually set to just Super after
all... it's set to Super+S. I can change it to other values (like Print, to
put it on the other side of the keyboard just to test), but _it doesn't
actually stop Super from also working_.

I assume something is special-cased here so the modifier key alone can be
used. (Like, I can't set ctrl, alt, or shift to have a direct action.) Is
there a secret other setting somewhere for this?

[Florian Müllner]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 12:17, Matthew Miller 
 wrote:
> I assume something is special-cased here so the modifier key alone 
> can be
> used.

Correct, and there's more special-casing to make the key usable *both* 
as a stand-alone shortcut and as modifier.
> Is there a secret other setting somewhere for this?

Yes:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key '' // disable super
$ gsettings reset org.gnome.mutter overlay-key // re-enable super

Cheers,
Florian

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 06:27:40PM +0100, Florian Müllner wrote:
> $ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key '' // disable super
> $ gsettings reset org.gnome.mutter overlay-key // re-enable super

Perfect, thanks!