Changing Home and End Keys for Firefox
Filed Under Apple, Geek on 2009-03-04, 15:51
One of the biggest problems when I switched from my Windows laptop to OS X on my Macbook Pro was the lack of dedicated Home/End keys. Having to hit function and the arrow keys to get my Home/End navigation was annoying. I’ve now adjusted to it and have a callous on my left pinky to prove it. But Home and End don’t always behave the way I expect. This is most apparent to me in Firefox when I’m attempting to write or edit a blog post using WordPress’s web interface. The default behavior is to jump to the beginning or the end of the form, not the line of text I’m on. I had to change this. Luckily I found this tip over on macosxhints.com. It’s relatively simple to modify the behavior to the “right” way in Firefox, although you’ll have to do it each time Firefox updates:
- 1. Make a backup first and then unzip or jar extract the contents of /Applications/Firefox.app/Content/MacOS/chrome/toolkit.jar into a temporary directory. You might have to right-click on Firefox and select “show package contents”
- 2. Replace the platformHTMLBindings.xml file found in content/global with this one.
- 3. Zip or jar to recreate the archive (jar cvf toolkit.jar content/) and replace the original.
Or instructions for those that are more command-line inclined:
cd tempdir
cp /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/chrome/toolkit.jar .
jar xvf toolkit.jar
Replace content/global/platformHTMLBindings.xml with this one
jar cvf toolkit.jar content/
mv toolkit.jar /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/chrome/