Broken Keyboard Shortcuts in Texmaker with Ubuntu 14.10

The latest release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn), was released on October 23, 2014, and like many others I immediately updated my primary machine. Moving to a new version of any operating system on launch day can expose you to bugs that haven't been fixed yet.

With this release, I noticed a problem with my preferred LaTeX editor, Texmaker. Namely, many keyboard shortcuts no longer worked. Most importantly, I could no longer use a keyboard shortcut to "Quick Build," which greatly impacted my normal workflow. Looking online I found bug reports here and here. It seems that the problem lies with Qt5 in 14.10. Fortunately, the author of Texmaker still provides versions of Texmaker which are complied with Qt4.

First, you will need to remove the current version of Texmaker. This can be accomplished with the following command:

sudo apt-get remove texmaker

In the interest in being tidy, you can then run

sudo apt-get autoremove

to remove some Qt5 files that you no longer need.

Now, go to the Texmaker download page and download the Qt4 files for your architecture. Once this file has downloaded, double click it and when software center opens, click install. As the configuration files work for both the Qt4 and Qt5 versions, you settings should still be intact.

Note: Ubuntu considers the Qt5 version to be an updated version of the Qt4 package we installed. Thus, it will prompt you that an update is available. If you allow this update, you will again break the keyboard shortcuts unless the Qt5 version has been patched after this posting.