"KeyFixer" Firefox Plugin: Forces correct behavior of HOME/END keys on the Mac. | Hacker News Reader

"KeyFixer" Firefox Plugin: Forces correct behavior of HOME/END keys on the Mac.

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13 pointsasciilifeform14 comments

i love this plugin. one of the things that keeps me off of safari, no way to fix this (that I know of)

my main beef with OS X is weird keyboard behavior. CMD instead of CTRL is fine, but home/end/pageup/pagedown behavior is retarded. and the laptops don't even have those keys!

I believe all three of these methods should work in most native OS X applications:

  Cmd+left arrow/Cmd+right arrow
  Ctrl+left arrow/Ctrl+right arrow
  Ctrl+a/Ctrl+e

And Cmd+up/Cmd+down will send you to the beginning or end of a textarea.

I personally use the built-in Emacs bindings whenever possible.

The problem is that FF isn't Cocoa (or wasn't, last I looked), so the native Cocoa text handling doesn't kick in.

That pretty much keeps me from ever using FF.

And delete key doesn't do it job: delete ... I constantly hit the delete key just to have Finder stay there doing nothing laughing haha at me. Take me 3 seconds to realize that i must use Cmd + Backspace to delete stuff. What is the delete key for then ?

Doesn't it make more sense to require that little bit of verification that yes, you did mean to delete the file?

To me, no. It's true that Apple's target customers don't pride themselves on their hardcore nerd skills, but an option to manage this behavior would be nice. It's exactly this sort of thing which makes me not want to own a Mac.

If Apple want to verify whether users really want to delete files, then make a popup or dialogue or whatever prompting users to confirm. That would make a bad user experience, but at least i would understand the idea. Using two keys instead of one is not verification !

Anyway there is another protection layer: the recycle bin ...

Deleting text selections? Like in the rename mode triggered by hitting return?

"open" is cmd-return (and cmd-down, cmd-up is "..") -- would you rather it had the windows behavior of opening every last thing in your selection from hitting enter on extra time when clearing a dialog? I get fucked by that at least once for every couple hours of Windows Explorer usage.

The thing that trips me up most, for key behavior differences, is that in (most?) Windows applications, pressing the down arrow on the last line does NOT take you to the end of the line, as you'd expect. Nor does pressing up while on the first line take you to the beginning.

This is what pisses me off most too, by several orders of magnitude. I hit it every single time I edit text in an environment that fucks it up.

Firefox is especially bad in fields where it has history to complete -- pressing up is what I do most, which triggers completion at the end of the list. It's best case behavior is when there are no completions, where it ironically takes you to the end of the line!

I'm more interested in ctrl-a/e working properly on mac firefox.

Don't they?

When I type this message (on mac firefox), ctrl-a/e takes me to the beginning and end of the line, which is what I expect. Also, ctrl-w, deletes a word backward, ctrl-k kills to the end of the line.

Most of these seem to work http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/bash/

EDIT: I should add one more thing ... ctrl-w on firefox is very useful in the location bar (as in, it's very smart about what it defines as 'a word').

Odd. When I hit ctrl+a in the location bar it turns on find highlighting. Perhaps it only works when the find bar isn't activated?

The find 'bar' does change the behavior. I've learned to keep it closed when not using it (hitting cmd-f then esc has become a habit).

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