203808 - defining tailored shortcuts should be easy

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 57805

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Richard Kilgore]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312
Build Identifier: 

Every time I want to access some functionality using the keyboard by either
changing whatever shortcut already exists or adding one where it does not
exist, I end up having to do something like a month worth of stabbing in the
dark and searching on Google, and then I usually don't succeed.

I have keyboard shortcut tweaks that I perform every time I upgrade
Mozilla, and I keep a HOWTO file around, because no matter how many
times I do it, it's too complicated to remember.  Here are the files
I edit every time:

    res/builtin/userHtmlBindings.xml
    toolkit/content/global/bindings/tabbox.xml (in a chrome .jar file)
    content/global/finddialog.js (chrome file)
    content/navigator/platformNavigationBindings.xul (chrome file)
    locale/en-US/communicator/viewZoomOverlay.dtd (chrome file)
    locale/en-US/navigator/navigator.dtd (chrome file)

The only thing close to a formal document describing how to do this of
which I am aware is at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html.
Except for the most common types of customization, this document is for
all intents and purposes useless.

As an exercise, try to take information received only from the Customizing
Mozilla document I mention above and from Google searches (including groups)
to figure out how to bind a keyboard shortcut to Edit->Preferences...
I've given up.  I'll just have to use the damn menus.

As a contrast, in a GTK application, I open the menu, and with the item
Preferences... highlighted (i.e., the mouse hovering over the menu item),
I type Alt+P, and the string "Alt+P" appears on the right-hand side of the
menu, and now I have a shortcut!  Most window managers allow you to specify
one of hundreds of functions in a single config file, and all of them are
well-documented in a man page.  In M$ word or OpenOffice, there is a dialog
window for keyboard customization that lists hundreds of functions to which
one can bind a shortcut by selecting it and then typing the shortcut.

All this said, the situation is _still_ better than it is in IE.  But if
it were easy, it would be a much more convincing feature!  As it is, the
configurability of the keyboard might as well not exist for 99% of the
population.


keywords: shortcuts key keyboard bindings keybindings accel command

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Richard: do you have a proposed method for doing this? I think it would require
another layer on top of XUL to manage keyboard shortcuts...

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 57805 ***