>The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document)
That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing (and since Windows is the overwhelming presence, is commonly misunderstood as the keys themselves meaning that) and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now.
You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.
> I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line
Anything that doesn't override Cocoa's default key bindings will be able to use the emacs key bindings as well (Cntrl-A for the beginning and Cntrl-E for the end of the line)
>in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works
> You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.
not on my machine. As I said, I used ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to change it. If the OS provides a way to change defaults, I expect applications to respect that too - no matter the historical reasons.
> >in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works
> cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.
Yes, but Command-Left/Right is something that worked on the Mac even since before OSX. I, again, see no reason why it wouldn't work here.
If the application overrides the defaults (which is fairly common ), your changing the defaults does nothing (for that application and for the keys that might have been overridden). It sounds like Firefox overrides the defaults completely but in it's override "map" keeps some of the functionality the same as the default.
I havn't used it but this claims it will change the Firefox behaviour as well (specifically make them behave like windows for the home and end keys)
I think cmd-left and cmd-right are used by Firefox for " back" and "forward" so those never work on Firefox (unless perhaps you go find where Firefox specifies its key bindings and change them)
>That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing
Is it? I'm used to them going to the beginning and the end of lines on Linux.
The very next line you quoted tells you why that is the case on Linux now. if you used Linux in the late 90's, you will remember that a lot of the popular window managers/desktop environments aimed to make your transition from Windows 95 easier and the current Linux behaviour is a result of that.
That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing (and since Windows is the overwhelming presence, is commonly misunderstood as the keys themselves meaning that) and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now.
You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.
> I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line
Anything that doesn't override Cocoa's default key bindings will be able to use the emacs key bindings as well (Cntrl-A for the beginning and Cntrl-E for the end of the line)
>in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works
cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.