GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 266887
Evolution 2 is an Emacs shortcuts hater
Last modified: 2004-10-07 23:35:39 UTC
Description of Problem: Evolution 2 has patchy respect for the GNOME Emacs shortcut keys setting in textboxes/textareas. Things like the Find Now bar in the mail component will highlight all the mail message rather than jump to start of line when pressing ctrl-a. The New Mail message window (Ctrl-Shift-M) message editing area is slightly better and seems to do jump to start of line on Ctrl-A but closes the window rather than deleting back a word on Ctrl-W. Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. In a terminal issue the following to turn Emacs shortcuts on: gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme -tstring Emacs 2. Start evolution. 3. Go to the contacts view (Ctrl-F2) 4. In the text area to to the left of the "Find Now" button type "Vi rules!" and then press Ctrl-W. Actual Results: Window is closed. Expected Results: "rules!" to be deleted from the textbox. How often does this happen? Every time. Additional Information: Different parts of the interface will have different problems with emacs shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl-E works in the Find Now box of the contacts view but does an expunge in the Find Now box of the Mail view).
Changed the title a bit because I don't think Evolution 1.4 had such a strong dislike of Emacs shorcuts. I should also mention that a lot of Emacs keys bugs have been duped on bug 241187 (Emacs keybindings ...) which (at the time of writing) is marked resolved fixed.
Shortcuts take precedence over emacs keybindings. GNOME issue, not really Evolution's. That's why bug 241187 is closed, we can't do anything else beyond the mail editor with too much pain.
Ok thanks for the reply on this. According to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102212 "Accelerators take priority, that's how it works." so it looks like it will never be fixed on the GNOME end. Is the pain in 1. Maintaining the emacs key binding patches 2. In implementing emacs key binding patches in the first place If it's 2. if I were to create some patches would they stand a chance of being merged into the evolution proper or would they dropped for being too messy? Also, is there any chance of implementing emacs Ctrl-W on the mail editor?
You can send your patches to evolution-patches mailing list. I'd also advise you to discuss all kind of technical questions in evolution-hackers mailing list. You may need to subscribe, see http://lists.ximian.com