Firefox Quantum: Fixing Ctrl W (or other key bindings) (Shallow Thoughts)

Firefox Quantum: Fixing Ctrl W (or other key bindings)

When I first tried switching to Firefox Quantum, the regression that bothered me most was Ctrl-W, which I use everywhere as word erase (try it -- you'll get addicted, like I am). Ctrl-W deletes words in the URL bar; but if you type Ctrl-W in a text field on a website, like when editing a bug report or a "Contact" form, it closes the current tab, losing everything you've just typed. It's always worked in Firefox in the past; this is a new problem with Quantum, and after losing a page of typing for about the 20th time, I was ready to give up and find another browser.

A web search found plenty of people online asking about key bindings like Ctrl-W, but apparently since the deprecation of XUL and XBL extensions, Quantum no longer offers any way to change or even just to disable its built-in key bindings.

I wasted a few days chasing a solution inspired by this clever way of remapping keys only for certain windows using xdotool getactivewindow; I even went so far as to write a Python script that intercepts keystrokes, determines the application for the window where the key was typed, and remaps it if the application and keystroke match a list of keys to be remapped. So if Ctrl-W is typed in a Firefox window, Firefox will instead receive Alt-Backspace. (Why not just type Alt-Backspace, you ask? Because it's much harder to type, can't be typed from the home position, and isn't in the same place on every keyboard the way W is.)

But sadly, that approach didn't work because it turned out my window manager, Openbox, acts on programmatically-generated key bindings as well as ones that are actually typed. If I type a Ctrl-W and it's in Firefox, that's fine: my Python program sees it, generates an Alt-Backspace and everything is groovy. But if I type a Ctrl-W in any other application, the program doesn't need to change it, so it generates a Ctrl-W, which Openbox sees and calls the program again, and you have an infinite loop. I couldn't find any way around this. And admittedly, it's a horrible hack having a program intercept every keystroke. So I needed to fix Firefox somehow.

But after spending days searching for a way to customize Firefox's keys, to no avail, I came to the conclusion that the only way was to modify the source code and rebuild Firefox from source.

Ironically, one of the snags I hit in building it was that I'd named my key remapper "pykey.py", and it was still in my PYTHONPATH; it turns out the Firefox build also has a module called pykey.py and mine was interfering. But eventually I got the build working.

Firefox Key Bindings

I was lucky: building was the only hard part, because a very helpful person on Mozilla's #introduction IRC channel pointed me toward the solution, saving me hours of debugging. Edit browser/base/content/browser-sets.inc around line 240 and remove reserved="true" from key_closeWindow. It turned out I needed to remove reserved="true" from the adjacent key_close line as well.

Another file that's related, but more general, is nsXBLWindowKeyHandler.cpp around line 832; but I didn't need that since the simpler fix worked.

Transferring omni.ja -- or Not

In theory, since browser-sets.inc isn't compiled C++, it seems like you should be able to make this fix without building the whole source tree. In an actual Firefox release, browser-sets.inc is part of omni.ja, and indeed if you unpack omni.ja you'll see the key_closeWindow and key_close lines. So it seems like you ought to be able to regenerate omni.ja without rebuilding all the C++ code.

Unfortunately, in practice omni.ja is more complicated than that. Although you can unzip it and edit the files, if you zip it back up, Firefox doesn't see it as valid. I guess that's why they renamed it .ja: long ago it used to be omni.jar and, like other .jar files, was a standard zip archive that you could edit. But the new .ja file isn't documented anywhere I could find, and all the web discussions I found on how to re-create it amounted to "it's complicated, you probably don't want to try".

And you'd think that I could take the omni.ja file from my desktop machine, where I built Firefox, and copy it to my laptop, replacing the omni.ja file from a released copy of Firefox. But no -- somehow, it isn't seen, and the old key bindings are still active. They must be duplicated somewhere else, and I haven't figured out where.

It sure would be nice to have a way to transfer an omni.ja. Building Firefox on my laptop takes nearly a full day (though hopefully rebuilding after pulling minor security updates won't be quite so bad). If anyone knows of a way, please let me know!