My “desktop environment” is just i3 at this point, so there’s no GNOME or other Gtk environment to meet the shortcuts enabled in GNOME requirement.

Fortunately, there’s a way around that. After cobbling together a post from 2004 (which no longer works but points in the right direction) with a much more recent post, the following appears to work:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme Emacs
mkdir -p ~/.config/gtk-3.0
cat <<EOF >settings.ini
[Settings]
gtk-key-theme-name = Emacs
EOF

and restart Firefox. Note I’m using the Gentoo desktop profile, so gsettings and the gtk config directory already existed despite not running GNOME.

The only caveat I have so far is that I now have to exit focus from text inputs, including the address bar, before I can use Firefox shortcuts like C-h (history).

The latter article also mentions ui.key.accelKey, which pointed me to generalAccessKey, too. I might experiment with using other keys there, once I know what they control.

Update later that day: It seems generalAccessKey=224 lets me use Command (Meta), and I’m not sure changing accelKey had any real affect. The one downside here is that M-q quits without warning despite those settings not changing. Oh well.

PS I know, there’s probably a way to get Vim + Firefox to work these days. I’ll explore that later. For now, I’m used to browsers, Slack, and others at least letting me edit from a sensible part of my keyboard (C-n, C-a, C-k, etc.) when I’m not in Vim.

Categories: Blog