Use CTRL-SPACE to open menu on Linux Mint

Question

I'd like to use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SPACE to open/close the Linux Mint menu (similar to how Command + SPACE is used on OS X to show/hide Spotlight).

I tried going to Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> Cinnamon and setting CTRL + SPACE for the key "Menu button". Upon restarting, the key combination doesn't work at all.

This is a vanilla install of Linux Mint 17.

Answer 1

Control-space is used for other things, which may interfere:

• it is used in some applications to trigger an input method (see for example How to disable Ctrl-Space selecting chinese keyboard on windows 7? [duplicate])
• in a terminal, it sends an ASCII NULL (a zero), which can confuse applications which handle nul-terminated strings.