Behaviour of ctrl key sequences in firefox-1.0PR

[j.hatton at its.uq.edu.au]

Hi,

I work with Eric, and am the other person using thunderbird and
encountered the login problem - thanks for getting back to him so
quickly! We're in the process of re-upgrading thunderbird as I
speak.

I've lately portupgraded to firefox-1.0PR and I have found a couple
of what for me are serious usability issues. I cannot say if these
are linked, but the behaviour seems to indicate it. First, I can
no longer use ctrl-u, ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k and so on in the URL
field, or any other text input field. Additionally, any movement
input using neither arrow keys nor the usual emacs ctrl key sequences
is possible in text input fields.

Although the latter issue seems more serious on the surface, I'm
sure it is just a bug and will be easily fixed - it is the loss of
key bindings for ctrl that is causing me real angst. This causes
me real problems with pasting from other applications (I'm on FreeBSD
5.3BETA7), as I would usually select some text in the shell, click
into the URL field, ctrl-u, middleclick paste and so on. Needless
to say, ctrl-u now produces something entirely unwanted, and
attempting to paste with ctrl-v leaves me with the problem of
removing the old text and highlighting replaces what is in the mouse
buffer! Basically, my only option is to backspace over the entire
line - not fun...

What I'm a little concerned about philosophically, going forward,
is whether this adoption of Microsoft key bindings will continue
as this appears to be at odds with the mouse select/paste model in
X - something I'm very fond of, and one of my primary reasons for
preferring to work in X rather than with MS windows. At present, I
am using Mozilla 1.7 as a workaround as I found it impossible to
work happily without the simple ability to kill text from and move
within an input field.

best regards,
-- 
Joel Hatton
Incident Response Team
University of Queensland