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GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 13, 2005 20:58 UTC (Tue) by mightyduck (subscriber, #23760)In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by jdub
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
But even for an experienced user it's sometimes nearly impossible to find
out how to change some very trivial things. For instance, the only
GNOME-like application I use at times is Firefox (I know it's GTK and not
GNOME but that all comes from the same stable to me). What drives me nuts
in Firefox are the freakin' wrong button order and the key bindings in
the location bar (every time I press CNTRL-U it wants to show me the
HTML-source). Now, after googling for quite some time I found that I have
to put the following stuff into my .gtkrc-2.0 file:
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
gtk-alternative-button-order = 1
I did that and you know what, it STILL doesn't work! I tried all kinds of
things with gconf-editor and whatnot in order to fix that broken stuff
but until now I couldn't figure out how to change it! The result is, I
stay away more and more from GTK- and GNOME-apps because it drives me
nuts. Now you can call me an oldtime UNIX user (the ones you apparently
don't care about and try to piss off as much as possible) but I still
have some influence and I really can't recommend something (even to your
doctor) which I'm not able to use myself.
(Log in to post comments)
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 13, 2005 21:13 UTC (Tue) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]
While we're griping about GTK, can someone please tell me why every timeI hit + in GAIM or another GTK app, it renders as a tiny superscript plus
sign? Why do I always get these weird "binary character" graphics in the
course of normal IM conversations with a small amount of copy/paste? Why
does copying text out of a syntax-highlighting editor result in broken,
non-newline-terminated colourized text showing up in the GTK edit box I'm
pasting into?
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 14, 2005 0:51 UTC (Wed) by diakka (guest, #10310) [Link]
use gconf-editor and set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs".
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 14, 2005 17:35 UTC (Wed) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link]
use gconf-editor and set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme to "Emacs".
Settings you make with gconf-editor will only be used if gnome-settings-daemon is running when you start firefox. If you don't use gnome-settings-daemon, you are correct in editing your ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file.
Note that ~/.gtkrc-2.0 is just silently ignored if gnome-settings-daemon is running.
There's also the possibility that you don't have the Emacs theme in /usr/share/themes/.
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:24 UTC (Thu) by mightyduck (subscriber, #23760) [Link]
I made the change with gconf-editor but it still didn't work at first.Now I switched to KDE 3.5 and the gtk-key-theme suddenly works! I have no
idea why it decided to respect my settings now. The only thing which
started up together with firefox is gconfd-2. Maybe that's the
gnome-settings-daemon which makes it work? I don't know.
Anyway, thanks for all the hints, but my point is that it's extremely
complicated even for experienced users to change such simple things.
Maybe GNOME should provide an "idiot" and a "poweruser" mode if they
don't want to confuse their doctors. Then at least the ones who want to
tweak obscure settings and know what they're doing can switch to
"poweruser" and mess up their UI in whatever way THEY want. I still
believe the UI should adapt to the user and not the other way around.
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:25 UTC (Thu) by gallir (subscriber, #5735) [Link]
Oh my freaking God. Is that "usable", "simple", "it just works". I'mstill parsing what I should do to change key bindings in Firefox.
So, to be sure it reads my resource file I should first do some "ps -
kill -9" commands? No, I can't believe it.
BTW, I'm a vim user. What's the "emacs' style"? :-)
GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition
Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:37 UTC (Thu) by mightyduck (subscriber, #23760) [Link]
BTW, I'm a vim user. What's the "emacs' style"? :-)I'm a vi/vim user myself but I frequently use CNTRL-U in the shell in
order to clear the command line and I want to do the same in the firefox
location bar. But the default binding for CNTRL-U in firefox is "view the
HTML source" which drives me nuts if I hit it by accident. And, believe
me, I'm not the only one here, most of my coworkers complained about
that. Maybe it appeases the Windows crowd (which we don't have here
except for our secretaries and they're not used to keybindings at all,
they just point and click with the mouse) but it drives UNIX users
insane.