Key bindings in Firefox; edit vs. sidebars!

[Eric Dunbar]

On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 12:11:35 +0000, Neil Woolford
<neil at neilwoolford.co.uk> wrote:
> A couple of levels down under the Firefox view menu you can turn
> sidebars for history and bookmarks on and off.  This a touch buried for
> such a useful feature, so there are hot-keys for the job, Ctrl+H and
> Ctrl+B respectively.

All a matter of perspective :-) To me Ctrl-H ought to *hide* (minimise
to dock) the window and should IMNSO be a system-wide reserved
key-stroke & behaviour (ctrl-h is not used much in the grand scheme of
things anyway so it wouldn't be a big loss to lock down a key for such
a useful feature (Windows has windows-key-m but that hides
everything)).

I really like Safari's (infinitely, IMNSHO) and Mac Internet
Explorer's History pull-down menu. Others (like you ;) love Netscape's
default solution (slow as molasses in January mind you).

> When I first tried to use these hot-keys, they appeared not to function.
> 
> Closer inspection of the problem reveals a clash of key-bindings;  when
> the text cursor is active in an entry box Ctrl+B gives a non-destructive
> backspace and Ctrl+H a destructive (erasing) one.  These are (I think)
> common editor bindings for these keys.  If the text cursor is not
> active, then the sidebars do appear in response to the hot-keys.

IIRC they are vestiges from the old terminal days when "special"
characters were sent as control escape sequences. ctrl-m = cr, ctrl-l
= line feed, ctrl-h = backspace, ctrl-b = left arrow (non-destructive
backspace), ctrl-g = bell (had a lot of fun with that one on modems
;-).

It's a tad strange that they'd be active in a modern GUI, especially
when the ctrl key is universally used to issue commands to
applications (and, since ALL keyboards have backspace, arrow keys,
page-up/down/end/home keys this is redundant... even the smallest
laptops have these keys (sometime buried under Fn)).

Having different modalities (?) in a text editing box is a *bad*,
*bad* idea. This is a problem that ought to be addressed upstream, if
it's indeed true.

The other thing that I would also really like to see is to have the
whole URL selected when you click on the address bar. Rarely do I have
to edit part of an URL (& I suspect that I'm not that much different
from the "typical" user) so it makes more sense to accomodate what
happens most of the time.

My partner now automatically restarts the computer when she finds it
in Ubuntu -- she finds the FireFox interface too unpolished to bother
with & OO.org isn't compatible enough with the Word or Excel documents
that she has to download for work :-( ).

> My question is how can I enforce the binding to the sidebars (given in
> the Firefox menu) even when the text editing cursor is live?

Something that ought to happen upstream IMNSHO.

Eric.