314597 - ^W madness

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 48333

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Jones]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1

^W means "close tab", but in every console application ever, emacs readline bindings make it mean "delete previous word". These two are not especially similar.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Watch an old unixy person type a long essay into a web form
2. Watch how they kill the tab part way through when reflexively deleting a word
3. Watch how they want to tear firefox to tiny pieces for being so dumb

Actual Results:  
All the typed data is lost without so much as a by-your-leave

Expected Results:  
Firefox behaves like sane browsers and says "are you sure you want to close this tab, you seem to have been typing in it".
It bothers to mention you have multiple tabs open, to my mind this is even more important (especially because I just lost a bunch of typing *again* to it)

Comment 1

[Stefan Pietschmann]

My suggestion: Get the undoclosetab extension. That way you can recover accidentally closed tabs (including the text you inserted).

A popup dialog everytime I close a tab would drive me nuts, and another option to disable this would clutter the option UI.

Suggestion: WONTFIX

Comment 2

[u63580]

What would you suggest instead, BTW?  Most simple combos are taken, and there is the problem of different platforms (for example, here on Windows I also have Ctrl-F4 for close tab, but *nix and Mac people wouldn't be happy with that).

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

emacs keybindings used to be on by default (under Linux), but they got switched off because there were too many complaints (bug 218889 for instance).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 72352 ***

Comment 4

[Chris Jones]

Stefan: I get the closing multiple tabs one more than I accidentally close my own tabs, so I would prefer to get a warning for ^W (I mean that it should only ever warn you if you have actually typed something into a form field - there should be no warning for closing an unmodified tab.

Joseph: I appreciate that this is my own reflexes failing me, so I would be tempted to say have ^W mean delete-word in a text entry and close tab elsewhere, but obviously this is very inconsistent and confusing. I'm not sure I would map it to anything - my reflexes certainly aren't going to change, I use ^W too much in terminals, so having it be something else in firefox wouldn't stop me hitting it.

Comment 5

[Chris Jones]

I'm not sure this is a dupe of 72352, he wants to turn bindings off (which seems to happen by default now), I want to turn them on. Plus that bug doesn't actually have any kind of resolution or outcome (or indeed any change for a year)

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #5)
> I'm not sure this is a dupe of 72352, he wants to turn bindings off (which
> seems to happen by default now), I want to turn them on. Plus that bug doesn't
> actually have any kind of resolution or outcome (or indeed any change for a
> year)
> 

Well, if he doesn't want the bindings, and you do, then you need a solution like bug 72352.

The problem is that emacs keybindings (ctrl-W, ctrl-A, ..) conflict with the GUI. And don't forget the HTML-accelerators on a Mac, ctrl-W selects the whiteboard), or the various IME input methods. Whatever you do, there will be always be someone complaining. We probably need a dozen different ctrl, alt, cmd, meta, ... keys.

Comment 7

[Chris Jones]

Maybe I am being blind, but I don't see any solutions in 72352.

I don't really care about emacs bindings and I don't use them other than ^W, I just don't want tabs I have typed something into closing without a warning.

Comment 8

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Maybe I am being blind, but I don't see any solutions in 72352.
> 
> I don't really care about emacs bindings and I don't use them other than ^W, I
> just don't want tabs I have typed something into closing without a warning.
> 

Dupe of bug 48333 then ? Your ^W (delete word) still wouldn't work, but you won't be able to close the window or tab without a warning dialog.

Comment 9

[Stefan Pietschmann]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Stefan: I get the closing multiple tabs one more than I accidentally close my
> own tabs, so I would prefer to get a warning for ^W (I mean that it should only
> ever warn you if you have actually typed something into a form field - there
> should be no warning for closing an unmodified tab.

Alright Chris, that sounds reasonable to me (having lost some forum entries like this as well ;))

/me votes for Bug 48333

Comment 10

[Chris Jones]

Aha thanks, I feel dumb for not spotting that. 48333 is definitely the crux of what I was trying to get at in my original red mist.
I hope it gets in sometime soon. Thanks again.

Comment 11

[Chris Jones]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 48333 ***