Xfce What the *(@*((#(!!! do I have to do to get Emacs keys in Chrome/Firefox text fields?

[cracauer@]

At the time of this writing I have Emacs keys in text fields on my Macs, but neither on FreeBSD nor Linux.

It used to be that you just put

gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

into ~/.gtkrc-2.0. Then into ~/.gtkrc-3.0.

Then it stopped working in simple DE environments and you had to have GNOME or KDE running (don't remember whether Xfce worked). Some kind of demon was required to "transport" that gtkrc setting to a running browser. I tried to narrow down which process that was, but never got to a conclusion.

Now I wanted to re-visit the issue and it turns out it doesn't work at all anymore

Anybody here has any clue what I have to do in 2024?

 

[cracauer@]

Something demon-ish is running and I configured it successfully:

% gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme 
'Emacs'

But no luck in Chrome.

 

[Maxnix]

Since you are using xfce, according to the GTK page of Arch Wiki, this should set Emacs key bindings:
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/KeyThemeName -s Emacs
Maybe Chrome will take your preference now.

 

[kpedersen]

But no luck in Chrome.

Perhaps if its going to keep breaking by the different programs / daemons, it might be better to compile it into Gtk and be done with it?

This is the patch OpenBSD use (Emacs keys are default):

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/x11/gtk+3/patches/patch-gtk_gtksettings_c?rev=1.25&content-type=text/plain

Maybe the Gtk maintainer will be happy to add it as a port option?

 

[cracauer@]

Since you are using xfce, according to the GTK page of Arch Wiki, this should set Emacs key bindings:
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/KeyThemeName -s Emacs
Maybe Chrome will take your preference now.

I already seem to have that:

% xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/KeyThemeName
Emacs

I am trolling the Chromium source code now. As far as I can tell I successfully told Gtk the right thing

 

[cracauer@]

What is a simple gtk app that has a text field?

 

[cracauer@]

What is a simple gtk app that has a text field?

mp3info-gtk

In there emacs keys work.

 

[cracauer@]

mp3info-gtk

In there emacs keys work.

Looking at the Chromium code in anger for the first time:
- 340 packages carried around in third_party
- including full copies of llvm, rust, a software vulkan renderer and a 3d to 3d api translator
- 271,596,475 lines of code, 221,804,027 of which are in third_party (FreeBSD has 70,965,314, 14,326,429 of which are in contrib/), Linux kernel 34,388,155, 23,998,760 in drivers/

Cover me, I'm going in... Well, next weekend.