[tomboy-list] Ctrl+W weirdities

[Todd Wilson]

Sandy Armstrong wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2008 4:22 PM, Todd Wilson <twilson at csufresno.edu> wrote:
>> I'm using Tomboy 0.8.0 on Ubuntu 7.10.  I have Emacs keybindings enabled
>> in Gnome:
>>
>>     In gconf-editor:
>>     desktop -> gnome -> interface -> gtk_key_theme -> Emacs
>>
>> However, when I'm typing a note, sometimes Ctrl+W closes the note, but
>> sometimes Ctrl+W instead deletes the word before the cursor.  In the
>> latter situation, if I right-click inside the note to get the context
>> menu, and then click outside of the menu to dismiss it, then Ctrl+W
>> reverts to closing the note.
>>
>> I would like Ctrl+W always to close the note, which I understood to be
>> the desired behavior.  Is this a bug?  Is there a patch/workaround?
> 
> About a year ago we took a patch [1] to support emacs keybindings like
> ctrl+w.  The inconsistency you're experiencing sounds buggy, though.
> Could you file something in bugzilla?

In Emacs, Ctrl+w defaults to 'kill-region', essentially what Ctrl-x does
now in Tomboy (and elsewhere).  I'm not sure where it gets bound to what
Emacs calls 'backward-kill-word', normally bound to Meta-Backspace, but
maybe that's part of the "Gnome Emacs bindings".  Nevertheless, as I
type this message into my Thunderbird compose window, my usual Emacs
bindings work (except, annoyingly, Ctrl-f for forward-char), and Ctrl-w
kills the window.

I'll make a bugzilla entry for it.

> Not sure what to do about the fact that some emacs keybinding users
> want ctrl+w to close the window and some want it to delete a word.  We
> should probably look and see what other GNOME apps (gedit, etc) do.

I mentioned Thunderbird's behavior already.  I can verify that, in
gedit, Ctrl-w deletes the previous word even though the advertised
keybinding for the menu selection File -> Close is Ctrl-w, and that
Ctrl-Backspace has the same function, so that Ctrl-w for this function
is redundant.  So, the issue may be Gnome-wide.

Andrew Conkling wrote:
> Just to make sure... you don't happen to use a non-default keyboard
> layout in GNOME, do you? Just want to make sure we're not seeing this
> terribly crazy bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162726.

No, nothing like the French layout.  The only keyboard munging that I've
done is to swap the CapsLock and Ctrl keys.

Todd Wilson