GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition [LWN.net]

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 14, 2005 17:35 UTC (Wed) by tjw.org (guest, #20716)
In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by diakka
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

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/.

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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'm
still 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.