Re: Firefox Unix Keybindings (Was: Start -> Shut Down -> Log Out)

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From: Smylers
Subject: Re: Firefox Unix Keybindings (Was: Start -> Shut Down -> Log Out)
Date: 09:37 on 13 Jul 2006
Guy Thornley writes:

> Oh now we get to one my pet [Firefox] hates; the one that I find most
> endearing: the handling of the multi-line text input dialoges. In many
> unix text editors, Ctrl-A is beginning-of-line; so you press Ctrl-A,
> and then press a key to insert whatever character you want: boom! all
> your text vanishes, because Ctrl-A is magically SELECT ALL instead.

That's actually a Gnome hate, or perhaps a GTK hate.  Firefox, for once,
is actually going along with what the local system has been configured
to use.  But Gnome these days now seems to ship by default with
Windows-esque keystrokes rather than traditional Unix ones.

Even more hatefully, there used to be a simple select box for switching
between the 2 sets of bindings in 'Preferences' > 'Keyboard Shortcuts',
but that was removed in Gnome 2.8.

So now the simplest way of specifying this is to put the following
setting into ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

  gtk-key-theme-name = 'Emacs'

At least with this being a plain text config file you can easily copy it
between accounts without having to select it gui-ily on each one.  But I
note that the filename hatefully has a version number in it, so
presumably whenever GTK 3 is released this file will be ignored and
everything will revert back to using the default keybindings.

Smylers
There's stuff above here

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