191190 - In Midas, support keyboard accelerators for formatting text

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1500682

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect)

Description

[Aaron Leventhal]

When Midas has focus, the meaning of some keys should based on the editing context:

Accel+B Bold
Accel+I Italic
Accel+U Underline
Accel+minus smaller
Accel+plus larger
Accel+[ or ]  -- decrease/increase indent
Accel+K -- spell check

We also may want to support some of our other keys, like paste as quotation
(accel+shift+v).

I wouldn't change the meaning of Accel+T to be fixed with. New tab is too
important. I would not implement Accel+L, but that's a tough call. Link/location
bar are both important.

This is similar to using Yahoo mail compose with IE -- these keystrokes work
there even though the menu items are not present.

Note, Accel+letter keys do not change based on i18n.

Comment 1

[Alfonso Martinez]

Just one note: with the spanish keyboard isn't possible (usually) to use the
Accel+[ or ] combos. the [ and ] need the use of the AltGr key and the ] is in
the same key that +

Of course it's better to have some shortcuts working that not having none :-),
so anything will be welcome.

Comment 2

[Mike Kaply [:mkaply]]

Why would we add these in rather than having the creator of the application do this?

It is only Accel+B on US keyboards, so this would be yet another translation hit.

If we did do this, we should probably just separate the composer accelerators
that already exist into another file and use them.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

Mike, that's not true. It's Accel+B on all keyboards.

Accesskeys change from language impl to language impl. Global keyboard
accelerators do not.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Filed bug 192330, "keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+V) for 'paste without formatting'."

Comment 5

[Samir Gehani]

adt: nsbeta1-

Comment 6

[Aaron Leventhal]

Samir, I think it's a mistake to minus this.
Keyboard accelerators are not a marginal feature of an editor.

Open http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/
and you'll see that keyboard accelerators work. For example, Ctrl+B makes text
bold while focused in the editor. If you click outside, Ctrl+B does bookmarks.
This is just how I would expect it to work.

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

I meant, open the demo in Internet Explorer, and you'll see the keyboard 
accelerators work. :-)

Comment 8

[Aaron Leventhal]

Here's where we determine what key bindings to use:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/content/xbl/src/nsXBLWindowHandler.cpp#219

We use a terrible hack:
if (presShell) {
248     PRInt16 isEditor;
249     presShell->GetSelectionFlags(&isEditor);
250     return isEditor == nsISelectionDisplay::DISPLAY_ALL;
251   }

It's considered an editor if selection can be displayed on anything.

Comment 9

[Anti Veeranna]

It's quite easy to make Midas support keyboard accelerators. I took the code at 
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/ and patched it to support B,I and U
accelerators.

You can try out the result here 
http://masendav.com/~duke/midas/

If you want to know how it's done, look for the kb_handler function in the source.

Comment 11

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.