fixing mozilla/firefox shortcuts

[update] The "Mozilla Suite" is now called "Mozilla Seamonkey"...and at least with Seamonkey 1.0a (mozilla rev 1.8b4) the res/builtin directory and all of it's .xml content is GONE. So this hack no longer works.

Looks like they rolled [all of?] res/builtin into chrome/toolkit.jar.

I don't know yet what it takes to unpack and repack the jar file....but might be able to get by using an editor that can safely edit binary files.

Ok, rumor has it that .jar files use traditional zip compression. So copy the chrome/toolkit.jar to a working directory, then unzip toolkit.jar

cd content/global and edit or replace the platformHTMLBindings.xml

Now cd ../.. and zip -r toolkit.jar content

Copy the toolkit.jar back to your chrome/ directory, restart your browser, and it should work! :)

[/update]

[edit] Turns out this hack /doesn't/ carry through to the new File dialogs.. [/edit]

As of some point in the mozilla 1.8 development cycle (between 1.8a2 and 1.8a5) , the mozilla/firefox developers decided to REMOVE the previously-supported EMACS style editing shortcuts for text boxes (and the address bar). This also affects Firefox builds based on this tree.

For Windows users this mostly moot...but for OSX or UN*X users who've been using these shortcuts in the browser since Netscape v1.something this is a rather drastic change.

Bugzilla is as usual a bit unwieldy tracking these down, but here's one version:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260572

A workaround can be found here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Emacs_Keybindings_(Firefox)


Note that Mozilla/Firefox devs now think that Firefox and Mozilla are GNOME applications.....absurd.

Anyway. No notice was made in any of the 1.8a5 release notes regarding this change.....and various pieces of documentation still suggest that these shortcuts are supported:

http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/


The workaround essentially replaces res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml with the old version that contains the emacs shortcuts. I've provided a copy here:

platformHTMLBindings.xml-with-emacs.txt

So far this works as expected, with EMACS shortcuts overriding Mozilla/Firefox shortcuts in text boxes.

For the search engines when they get here: Ctrl+U, Control U, Ctrl+A, Control A