twicetwice.net

The semi-personal blog of Jerrold Poh

REMAP CMD-ARROW KEYS IN FIREFOX FOR OS X

I'm not sure if this frustrates anyone else but on a Mac, the default keyboard shortcut to bring the cursor to the start of the line is command-left arrow.  Coincidentally, this is also the same shortcut in Firefox to go back one page in your browsing history.

There are some allowances for this to work though.  I.e. if the cursor is either in a single or multi-line text box, command-left arrow will take you to the beginning of the line.

If the cursor is in a custom control, i.e. a rich text markup input field i.e. on a blogging or internal wiki website, the cmd-left arrow shortcut takes you back one page in the history.  I can tell you now that there's nothing more frustrating than spending 15 minutes entering in a blog entry, hitting cmd-left arrow, going back one page in your browsing history and blowing away all the work you did in the last 15 minutes. 

This is fine in Safari though, as the keyboard shortcut to go back one page in your browsing history is cmd-[ and (after figuring this out on Safari) is also the same shortcut as in Firefox. 

So I did a bit of googling and found the forum post below, which is a link to an addon that allows you to remap and disable keyboard shortcuts in Firefox

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=72994

To be honest, I am a little dubious with the plugin as I've had a search of the official Firefox addon repository, and couldn't find it there so use at your own peril. 

Once it's installed hit the tools menu -> Keyconfig option and the following screen will be brought up.  

bindings.jpg

Select the command-left arrow keyboard shortcut and hit the disable button (you can do the same for the command-right arrow button too). 

Hit close, and either restart Firefox, or keep using it, and any new windows /  tabs which are opened will have the keyboard shortcut disabled. 

You can still go back and forward in your browsing history by using the cmd-[ and cmd-] keyboard shortcuts

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://www.twicetwice.net/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/31

Leave a comment