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Department of Information Technology

Some software configuration issues

I want to use Emacs keyboard shortcuts in Firefox
Advanced Firefox configuration
Mouse movements triggering unwanted Firefox actions
Fontsize in mozilla and related products

I want to use Emacs keyboard shortcuts in Firefox

Firefox no longer responds to Emacs keyboard shortcuts by default. If you want to use Emacs-style shortcuts, add the lines

include "/it/sw/share/X11/lib/themes/Emacs/gtk-2.0-key/gtkrc"
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

to the file .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory (create the file if it doesn't already exist, regardless of whether you actually use GTK) and restart Firefox. For detailed information, see mozillazine.

Advanced Firefox configuration

If you have very specific requirements, the "Preferences" settings probably won't provide a sufficiently large set of options for you. If you enter about:config in the URL field, you will be presented with a table of every Firefox parameter that can possibly be tweaked. To modify a parameter value, right-click on it and select "Edit".

Mouse movements triggering unwanted Firefox actions

Some laptop users find it a problem that Firefox treats accidental mouse movements as navigational commands (for instance, you can easily browse your history buffer by letting your finger touch the mouse pad moving upwards). You can disable this feature by visiting the advanced configuration page (about:config, see above), changing mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0 and mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to true.

Fontsize in mozilla and related products

If the text is to small in mozilla (or related products like seamonkey or firefox) you can hold control and press + for bigger text and - for smaller.
This only works for the text in homepages, if you would like to change the text size in menus the following trick can be used (for unix but similar for Windows):
go to .mozila in your home directory, in it ther is a directory with your username (or Default, for firefox its firefox) inside it there is a directory with a name that end with .slt(.default for firefox) and in it htere is a directory name chrome.
In there make a file named userChrome.css that contains:er:

window, menubar, menubutton, menulist, menu, menuitem {
font-size: 10mm !important;
}

This will make the text in manus, adressbar etc. 10 mm big. More info in: http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html

Updated  2009-06-22 10:15:00 by Erik Lundin (student).