Change Home/End behavior in Firefox and Thunderbird
Mar 23, '07 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: bloodnok
Ever since I got my nice new iMac, I've been driven spare by its weird Home/End key behaviour (jumping to the top or bottom of the entire document, instead of the start/end of a given line). This isn't escapee PC-weenie whingeing, either; I'm a Solaris admin, and these keys behave correctly on that OS, and on every Linux machine I've used. Thanks to a fellow sufferer, Kate@Sun, we have a solution:
- Unzip or jar extract the contents of /Applications » Thunderbird.app » [Control-click and show package contents] » Contents » MacOS » chrome » toolkit.jar into a temporary directory.
- Replace the file content » global » platformHTMLBindings.xml with this one. Do check this file first for nasties (there shouldn't be any).
- Zip or jar to recreate the archive (jar cvf toolkit.jar content/) and replace the original. Wise OS X users will have backed up the original first -- but I don't need to tell you that ...
Do the same, substituting Firefox.app. for Thunderbird.app and enjoy correct Home/End key behaviour ... and Kate asks "Anyone know how to package this up as a patch?"
[robg adds: Personally, I like the current behavior, but understand that some find it quite annoying. In testing this hint, I had some troubles with step one, but Google found this page in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base that explains exactly what you need to do -- jump down to the Any OS, without GTK section for the details. Additionally, you can remap these keys across all applications by following the directions in this blog post (I haven't tested that one). Finally, we have this detailed hint (which includes a link to a very detailed article) on customizing key bindings in Cocoa applications.]
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070320214340628