Fix input box keybindings in Firefox

Jun 29, 2011
tags: firefox

Those of us used to command line editing will no doubt have been frustrated many times in Firefox when editing text in an input box and subconciously hitting ctrl-w to delete-word, only to have the tab close and your work deleted.

Thankfully there is a workaround to this. It used to be a case of adding the following to .gtkrc:

gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

However these days it’s a gconf setting:

$ gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs --type string

This will bind ctrl-w to delete-word when in an input box, but retain the close tab binding elsewhere, a nice implementation of DWIM. See this page for more information.

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