471608 - Undocumented keyboard shortcuts for delete word in Message Composer/Editor

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Help Documentation, defect)

Description

[Valery Kondakoff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081228 Shredder/3.0b2pre

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a request for enhancement.

When editing mail in Message Composer/Editor (especially when reformatting the quoted text) it is very convenient to have a keyboard hotkeys to delete text word by word (to the left or right from cursor), to delete to the beginning/end of the line and to delete the entire current line.

Unfortunately Thunderbird does not support such a hotkeys. Can I ask you to consider implementing this feature?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
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Comment 1

[Simon Bünzli]

Deleting by word is Ctrl+Delete resp. Ctrl+Backspace as in every other app. As for deleting the start/end of a line, the official ways are Shift+Home,Delete and Shift+End,Delete. And for deleting lines, usually Shift+Down,Delete does the trick nicely.

Comment 2

[Aaron Lawrence]

Confirming Simon's comments. However, the thunderbird help 
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/keyboard
doesn't list these.

As to being standard, I don't really think so. 
Windows standard edit box: ctrl+del deletes to end of line, ctrl+backspace deletes word back
MS-word and firefox: both delete word
excel does not, ctrl+del deletes to end of line, ctrl+backspace does nothing
notepad does not, ctrl+del deletes to end of line and ctrl+backspace inserts some strange character;

So it's not standard enough to be relied on . I guess this should be a documentation enhancement. Who can update that page? I guess Thunderbird help is in a state of flux.

Comment 3

[Valery Kondakoff]

Ctrl-Del works in current TB3 nightly, thanks

Ctrl-Backspace not works at all

I can live without special hotkeys for deleting to the start/end of a line (Shift+Home,Delete and and Shift+End,Delete) , but I think having a special hotkey to delete current line is a 'must have'. 'Home, Shift+Down, Delete' - is too long to type!

Comment 4

[Aaron Lawrence]

Sorry Valery, are you saying that Ctrl-Backspace does NOT work?
It does in my current TB2.0.0.17, so maybe it has been broken. That should be logged as a separate bug...

Deleting current line is not a very common use case for email editing. In fact it's extremely rare. So you could submit an enhancement but it seems unlikely to happen.

Comment 5

[jenzed]

Added to Knowledge Base keyboard shortcut page: http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts