I use Kubuntu 24.04. My keyboard has working media playback keys. When I listen to music and a video starts playing, I want to pause the music. It usually pauses the video which i could also pause easily in other ways. Is it possible to write a script that toggles through the other media playing processes in terms of coupling them to the media keys?
Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.
For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.
The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.
playerctl can list and control (most) media players individually, and would be suitable for writing a script with. In terms of rebinding keys you might be able to set them to run shell commands using global shortcuts in KDE system settings, although I’m not at my computer right now to test it.
That looks promising, thank you.
I don’t have a solution for you, but to get you started, run xev and see which keycode event is triggered by the keypresses.
Or wev on wayland