260804 - Control-U no longer behaves as expected on Linux platform.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect)

Description

[Michael]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10

On versions of firefox previous to 1.0PR, control-u had two functions.

When a page was selected control-u viewed the source.
When a text-based control was selected control-u removed the text from this box.

1.0PR has removed this functionality and now control-u does not function as
expected.

Similar errors occur with control-k

This forms a large annoyance as the source of the current page keeps on popping
up every time I attempt to type in the url bar or the search box.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Using firefox 0.9 press ^u in the URL bar. Any text within the bar disappears.
Using firefox 0.9 click within the page and press ^u. The source is shown.

Using firefox 1.0PR press ^u in either the URL bar or the page. The source is shown.



https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16015 

This bug contains a description of why this behaviour should exist.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Invalid.  If you want Emacs bindings in Firefox 1.0PR, you have to set an option
in Gnome (see bug 258684 comment 10).

Comment 2

[Michael]

(see bug 258684 comment 10)

Can you add it to some documentation then?

Thanks.

Comment 3

[Michael]

Further information (if you are writing documentation about it)

Calling this "emacs mode" is misleading -- Control-U does not have this
behaviour in emacs. (at least, if i start emacs, then type into a scratch
buffer, then hit Control-U or Control-u then nothing occurs)

Its also been called a vi binding -- Control-U does not have this exact
behaviour in vi -- It deletes to the start of the line (opposite of Control-K).
This is the same behaviour as readline.

It seems that various other linux applications do use this binding -- irssi is
one, firefox seems to have inherited it from elsewhere

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Bryner: Comment 3 says Ctrl+U wasn't an Emacs binding.  Was it removed
intentionally anyway?  (In bug 257405?)

Does setting gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" restore Ctrl+U even though it's not an
Emacs binding?

Comment 5

[Michael]

As far as i can tell, this solves the issue (creating a new preferences file and
changing the mapping to be emacs).

I was just pointing out that calling it 'emacs' mode in any documentation may
confuse people, as I couldn't find out where in emacs the control-U binding
manages to delete a line of text. Otherwise I might have found this solution
previously (as in most other bug reports, it is called 'emacs-mode' or similar).

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

Michael Vrable pointed out to me that the keybindings are more similar to
readline than emacs, so on
http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Firefox_:_FAQs_:_Emacs_Keybindings 
I called them "Emacs-like / Readline-like".  Feel free to edit that page if you
have ideas for making it more clear, easier to find, less obvious that it was
written by a Windows user, etc.