Andy Lee’s weblog

I recently made small changes to two applications that I frequently use. As a result, the hours I spend at my computer every day will be a bit more pleasant.

Emacs keys in Firefox

One of the apps I tweaked was Firefox. Out of the box, Firefox does not support emacs key bindings, which has been a constant inconvenience to me. The basic emacs keybindings are ingrained in my muscle memory. I use them constantly in Xcode, Terminal, Eclipse, Mail, and so on. It’s distracting to have to remember to turn off that muscle memory when I’m using Firefox. One option has been to switch to Safari when I need to edit a bunch of text on a web page, but it’s annoying to use more than one browser. I want fewer tools, not more tools that mostly duplicate each other.

Today I found instructions for adding basic emacs keybindings to Firefox. The instructions were simple and worked like a charm. I’m using emacs keybindings right now as I type.

Border around Terminal windows

The other application I tweaked was Terminal.

I decided to use white-on-black Terminal windows instead of the default black-on-white. This was partly free choice, and partly because one of the shell scripts we use at work forces a black background, and if I stick with black text I won’t be able to read it.

I’d experimented with white-on-black before, thinking it might reduce eyestrain and make syntax highlighting easier to see. The problem was that Terminal windows have no border along the left and bottom edges, so overlapping windows look like this:

The black on black is confusing to the eye.

To fix this, I edited Term.nib in the Terminal app bundle. I selected the view called TermSubview and changed its dimensions by one pixel, from this…

…to this:

I tried altering the dimensions by more than one pixel, but this resulted in a small display error at the top of the window. (Putting on my programmer hat, I suspect the Terminal code is using window coordinates somewhere it should be using view coordinates.) Fortunately, a one-pixel border is visible enough, and while the display error is still there, it is negligible. Overlapping windows now look like this:

I’ve submitted a feature request to Apple asking that they add the border. Writing the request was a little easier, by the way, thanks to my new emacs keybindings.