894919 - RFE: Bind Ctrl+Shift+Space as keyboard shortcut to No-Break Space, alias NBSP (U+00A0)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Editor, enhancement)

Description

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

No-Break Space (U+00A0), aka NBSP, is very useful in a lot of situations:
* number’s position symbol for thousand, million, etc
* the space in front of question marks, exclamation marks in some non-English languages
* the space inside a telephone number so that the whole number is shown in one line instead of being cut by “end of line”
* etc

In Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer, No-Break Space is bound to Ctrl+Shift+Space.  So it would be nice to bind this keyboard shortcut to NBSP in the core so that it’s useable everywhere, eg web page forms, mailers

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

Providing NBSP is a responsibility of the system keyboard layout.  For layouts that provide it, we correctly recognize and inject it into the editable text.  For the ones that don't, it seems very odd for us to pick a magic combination.

Comment 2

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

The fact is, AFAIK, NO system provides direct input for NBSP.

Maybe it seems odd.  Maybe the suggested keyboard shortcut seems a magic combination.  But everything is a matter of viewpoint.

Just like Ctrl+X for cut, it was also considered a magic combination many many years ago. But with time as it becomes a convention, it's no longer considered as weird.

So, that would be the case for NBSP.  Either Mozilla stays as it is today and becomes old-fashioned, or it can become an early adopter.

Comment 3

[(no longer active)]

This is not a matter of being an early adopter.  We usually try very hard to stick with the platform conventions, so that Firefox and other Gecko based applications behave similar to other native applications on the given platform.  And to be honest, there aren't too many people who are asking for the addition of NBSP to our keyboard handling...

Comment 4

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Well, for "not too many people asking for this addition", it's because people didn't know they could "request for enhancement"!

If you want to keep this RFE as WONTFIX, it's your choice but I could assure you that you've made a mistake.

Comment 5

[(no longer active)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Well, for "not too many people asking for this addition", it's because people
> didn't know they could "request for enhancement"!

People ask for enhancements in Mozilla products all the time.

> If you want to keep this RFE as WONTFIX, it's your choice but I could assure
> you that you've made a mistake.

Keeping this bug open would be a miscommunication, since we probably won't accept a patch even if someone writes one.  I don't mean to be harsh here, and I do appreciate you spending the time to file this bug and discuss things here.  :-)

FWIW, I believe this will be a great area for an add-on to explore.