Once upon a time firefox came
out of the box with a set of key bindings reminiscent
of Emacs: c-a went to the beginning
of the line, c-f moved a character forward, c-b moved a character backwards,
and so on. But then things got “modern”, and the idea of moving around in the
text with keystrokes went out of fashion. That's what mice are for: take your hands off the
keyboard, look for the mouse, move to where you want to go, and in less than 10 seconds you
will have achieved what takes about 400 ms with the keyboard.
But I found a back door for hard core keyboard users: put this in a file ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
But of course that was too good to last: firefox migrated to GTK 3, and that required searching all over
again. But it's still possible: now the file is
called ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, and the entry increases to
[Settings]
gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs
And then things will be back the way rmsGod intended.
