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Comment by deergomoo | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if this is still the case as I haven’t used desktop Linux for about a year now, but what made this extra irritating is that the file name would be highlighted already! How on earth can selected text in an in-focus modal window not be the target of keyboard input?

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For me this is really annoying as well, together with the stupid text input fields that may display a blinking cursor even when they're not focused. And Firefox has this weird issue that now and then a newly opened tab doesn't focus the address bar, forcing me to use the mouse to select it.

And I still don't get this trend in some newer software to make tab switching via Ctrl-[Shift]-Tab feel like the lottery instead of just going to the one on the left or right. There's a reason we can reorder tabs by dragging them around, and a reason our keyboards have more than just those three keys, and "fidget cube replacement" is not it.

Sometimes I wonder if the UI designers never use their own products or just aren't aware that building habits for chains of workarounds should not be the normal way to interact with computers. /rant

Ctrl+L focuses the address bar. No need to lift your fingers from the keyboard.

Or alt+d or F6. These are mostly universal.

Not with big constructor slowly removing F1-F12 touches from the keyboard (Lenovo...)

ctrl+pageup/pagedown switches to the next/previous tab in Firefox and Chrome and also works on Windows.

If you have to use Firefox on shared computers occasionally, it may be worthwhile changing your habit to use ctrl+pgup/dn instead of ctrl+tab; ctrl+tab defaults to switching in order of most recently used tabs these days, while ctrl+pgup/dn stays with current tab order.

> And Firefox has this weird issue that now and then a newly opened tab doesn't focus the address bar, forcing me to use the mouse to select it.

I'm not sure I have this issue, but ctrl-L (or equivalently, ctrl-K) focuses the address bar. Less mouse usage.

If you keep them separate (it's configurable), Ctrl-L focuses the address bar, Ctrl-K focuses the search bar. I don't know how these keys behave if you configure it to use a single combined address/search bar (I've always kept them separate).

When combined, Ctrl-K focuses the address bar with a `? ` prepended, which turns it into a search bar. (In the most recent version it replaces the `?` with the name of the default search engine, similar to Chrome.)

ctrl-tab in Firefox can be configured to move through tab in a last-visited order, I personally love it and can't stand the lack of this feature in chrome/edge when I use them

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