486801 - can't change binding of control A in message composer

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[hedrick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.12 and 3 beta 2

I'm trying to install emacs bindings. I can get most of it by editing platformHTMLBindings.xml and change the keys. However nothing I do affects control A. It does select all, no matter what. Even redefining it is keyconfig has no effect.

This is ubuntu 9.04 beta. It occurs both with ubuntu's thunderbird and one from thunderbird.com.

by the way: looking at the bug history, it's pretty clear that lots of people expect emacs editing keys to work. Why is it so hard?  Like a number of other people, this is a showstopper for me. I don't really want to compose mail by moving the mouse around.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.see above
Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
see above

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us)
> AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16
> Build Identifier: 2.0.0.12 and 3 beta 2
> 
> I'm trying to install emacs bindings. I can get most of it by editing
> platformHTMLBindings.xml and change the keys. However nothing I do affects
> control A. It does select all, no matter what. Even redefining it is keyconfig
> has no effect.

There are lots of places where select all can be set:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/search?string=selectall&find=%2Flocales%2F&findi=&filter=^[^\0]*%24&hitlimit=&tree=comm-central

(specifically the ones in /editor/)

> by the way: looking at the bug history, it's pretty clear that lots of people
> expect emacs editing keys to work. Why is it so hard?  Like a number of other
> people, this is a showstopper for me. I don't really want to compose mail by
> moving the mouse around.

Generally we follow the platform standard for keys that are generic in other applications (e.g. select all, begin/end of line etc). Emacs isn't standard and would confuse the majority of users.

However, this bug is invalid as the key configurations can be set - you just have to find the right places to set the keys.

Comment 2

[hedrick]

This is one of the least helpful answers I've seen to a problem report. You're telling me that if I search through the source I'll find that I can fix it. Great.

In fact it looks like the problem is probably not within Thunderbird, but within something Ubuntu has done in setting up the libraries on which it depends. I just tried Debian, and if you set the GTK mode to Emacs, and map the accel key to alt, Emacs editing works fine.

Comment 3

[hedrick]

A workaround:

append /usr/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc to ~/.gtkrc-2.0

That fixes both thunderbird and firefox. Seems to confirm it as a problem in gnome/gtk. I don't believe changing any xul or xml files would have fixed it.