Adding a Terminal Hot Key Shortcut – Reader Questions
Janice emailed asking:
“…and lots of your posts show us how to do things in a terminal. Each time I have to go to Applications / Accessories / Terminal, isn’t there a faster way, like some key combination or something?…”
In Ubuntu (for that matter pretty much all Linux distros), you can set up “hot keys” to execute functions. In your case we’re going to set up a hot key for opening the Terminal in Ubuntu 8.04LTS. This way, you can access Terminal much faster!
Ubuntu already has a “Keyboard Shortcuts” tool. You can find it via System –> Preferences –> Keyboard Shortcuts
Scroll down (or up) to where it says “Open a terminal window” (as seen in the above screenshot).
Click on that line and select your shortcut by entering the key combination you want. In my case I selected ALT + F12. Now every time I press ALT and F12, a terminal will pop up.
Caveat: MAKE SURE that the key or key combination you select does not interfere with what has been configured for other actions!
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This site is intended for users, looking for solutions, fixes, tweaks to get things working just they way they should. User experiences are all here along with other helpful information for the new and experienced Linux (Ubuntu) user. 
One of the first things I do in Gnome is setup my hotkeys. I have Alt+E to open my Home folder and Alt+t to open a terminal.
I know that by mapping them to letters I inhibit being able to use Alt shortcut items in applications but I don’t do that anyway. If I need to access a GUI menu, I click it.
I’m in the terminal so much or launching Nautilus so frequently that these mappings easily outweigh any loss I would have.