Catproofing my keyboard shortcuts

Problem

I have a number of global keyboard shortcuts configured in my desktop environment (currently Xfce). They are:

My cat likes to flop over on my keyboard, and this can wreak havoc due to the global shortcuts. The main culprits were:

• Alt+F, Alt+X, Alt+O, Shift+Alt+Return: If held down, opens a huge number of windows.
• Alt+B, Alt+C, Alt+Z, Alt+D: Starts making noise, which can be jarring if I'm trying to do something else.

Mitigation: rate limiting

The first mitigation I implemented was rate limiting: instead of opening hundreds of web browser windows, it's limited to a more manageable number. I hacked together a small Python script to do the rate limiting: ratelimit. It is invoked like so:

$ ratelimit --help
usage: ratelimit [-h] [-n N] [-i I] [-k KEY] [-v] cmd [args ...]

Only allow a program to run N times every I seconds

positional arguments:
  cmd               Command to run
  args              Arguments to command

options:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  -n, --count N     Max executions per interval (default 3)
  -i, --interval I  Interval to limit execution count within (seconds, default 60)
  -k, --key KEY     Unique identifier for this command (defaults to command)
  -v, --verbose     Enable debug output

Mitigation: music player

To defuse the music player shortcuts, I modified them so they only act if the music player is currently running. Previously, they would launch the music player if it wasn't already running. Now, I must explicitly start the music player first.

I'm using Strawberry, so I changed the command from strawberry --play-pause to pgrep strawberry && strawberry --play-pause (and similar for the other shortcuts).

Final configuration

The configuration I ended up with is as follows:

This has been working reasonably well for me.