emacs keybindings for Thunderbird editor?

[Chris Menzel]

I have successfully gotten emacs keybindings working in Firefox under
FreeBSD by modifying platformHTMLBindings.xml. Similar modifications
have enabled me to get similar bindings in much of Thunderbird (e.g.,
simple text areas), but only a frustrating subset of them work in the
Thunderbird editor -- notably, while ctrl-[AEBK] are emacsish, I don't
seem able to alter the behavior of ctrl-P, ctrl-N, and ctrl-F, despite
the fact that they are correctly defined in the above xml file. I have
also tried adding the line

include "/usr/X11R6/share/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc"

in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 to call up an emacs keybinding scheme for gtk apps, with
no luck.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thunderbird is the best mailer I've
found for X11, but having to compose email without emacs bindings is
just not an option for me; they are just too hardwired into my fingers.

Chris Menzel

[Neil]

Post by Chris Menzel
I have successfully gotten emacs keybindings working in Firefox under
FreeBSD by modifying platformHTMLBindings.xml. Similar modifications
have enabled me to get similar bindings in much of Thunderbird (e.g.,
simple text areas), but only a frustrating subset of them work in the
Thunderbird editor -- notably, while ctrl-[AEBK] are emacsish, I don't
seem able to alter the behavior of ctrl-P, ctrl-N, and ctrl-F, despite
the fact that they are correctly defined in the above xml file.

So they work in FireFox, particularly in the Midas demo?
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/

[Chris Menzel]

Post by Neil

Post by Chris Menzel
I have successfully gotten emacs keybindings working in Firefox under
FreeBSD by modifying platformHTMLBindings.xml. Similar modifications
have enabled me to get similar bindings in much of Thunderbird (e.g.,
simple text areas), but only a frustrating subset of them work in the
Thunderbird editor -- notably, while ctrl-[AEBK] are emacsish, I don't
seem able to alter the behavior of ctrl-P, ctrl-N, and ctrl-F, despite
the fact that they are correctly defined in the above xml file.

So they work in FireFox, particularly in the Midas demo?
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo

Actually, no, not in midasdemo (except under OS X, no doubt because many
of the functions of Control under Linux and FreeBSD are subsumed by the
Mac Command key). I *really* hope the Mozilla folks allow
platformHTMLBindings.xml to override these defaults.

[Neil]

Post by Chris Menzel

Post by Neil

Post by Chris Menzel
I have successfully gotten emacs keybindings working in Firefox
under FreeBSD by modifying platformHTMLBindings.xml. Similar
modifications have enabled me to get similar bindings in much of
Thunderbird (e.g., simple text areas), but only a frustrating subset
of them work in the Thunderbird editor -- notably, while ctrl-[AEBK]
are emacsish, I don't seem able to alter the behavior of ctrl-P,
ctrl-N, and ctrl-F, despite the fact that they are correctly defined
in the above xml file.

So they work in FireFox, particularly in the Midas demo?
http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo

Actually, no, not in midasdemo (except under OS X, no doubt because
many of the functions of Control under Linux and FreeBSD are subsumed
by the Mac Command key). I *really* hope the Mozilla folks allow
platformHTMLBindings.xml to override these defaults.

OS X is different, because the GTK2 code queries Gnome for the key
bindings, while OS X relies on platformHTMLBindings.xml; maybe you can
figure out using bug 257405 if you can work around it.