[vox-tech] Firefox Ctrl-U n text entry field - solved!

[Troy Arnold]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 04:02:17PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> I forgot to list another major annoyance for me: I'm so used to emacs
> style editing in bash, that ctrl-u is burned into my brain as "clear
> line".  Unfortunately, it displays the page source on FF.  I've
> clicked away more page sources than I care to admit.
> 
> I know it's possible to change FF keybindings to emacs style or even
> vi style, but that requires reading, which I can't do ATM.

This has annoyed me for months and months and months.  I've probably
closed 14,000 unwanted 'view source' windows by now.  Using opera half
the time where ctrl-u works as expected has effectively prevented my
brain from learning that it doesn't work in firefox.

Anyway, I did some googling on this many months ago but failed miserably
and since then have been too lazy to investigate further.  But you and
several others mentioning this annoyance finally inspired me to figure
it out.

Firefox being a gtk-app should respect Gnome's keybinding preferences,
so I expected:
gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs
to work.

However, since I'm currently using KDE, and the gnome helper apps don't get
started, that didn't have any effect.

What did work: (Debian Sid; you may need to adjust paths for your distro)

1) Make sure that /usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc exists and has
the bindings you want.
2) in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 put:
include  "/usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc"
(or whatever subset of those bindings that you'd like to use for gtk2
apps.

Whew.  That was my most pressing remaining FF annoyance.

-troy