Mac Development

fix firefox keybindings

Note: in late 2005, I got around this problem entirely by installing the Conkeror Firefox Chrome, which not only gives emacs bindings, it gives an overall emacs-like look and feel, and emacs-ish extension functions (javascript, not elisp, but it's usable...) my firefox hacks have some of the extension code I use it with it. Still, this may be useful to some... or it may have been fixed entirely in Firefox 1.5, haven't checked yet...

Mac apps with text widgets get emacs-like keybindings for free, so Firefox stands out (in a bad way) for not having them. A blog posting supplied a clean-looking alternate version of the default XML file, with keybindings duplicated across sections ("modes".) Duplication means "opportunity for automation", and something this simple and text-oriented means Python.

• fix-firefox-bindings reads the platformHTMLBindings.xml file and writes out a new one with additional bindings.
• bindings_list is a basic set of bindings from the blog posting above.

A variety of things are missing; a few I have in mind are:

• per-binding-class specialization (in particular, c-n and c-p should probably be different in some of these modes) although there are hooks for identifying the binding ID.
• user-friendly management of the file (you'll want to read at least the comments to see what files come from where, just running it won't actually do you any good.)
• A rich enough set of bindings to make me happy (meta-f and meta-b are the first things I need to add.)

Safari Monitor

I keep a huge number of Safari windows open at any given time (the "window" menu usually has the little arrow at the bottom indicating "more windows below" :-) Thus if Safari crashes, the Mac crashes, I accidentally hit %Q instead of %W, I let the batteries run to far down, or any of a number of things that cause me to lose that state, I end up having lost a lot of state. This is unacceptable, and not what computers are for. Galeon had a reasonable implementation of this built-in; firefox has a SessionSaver that should do this but doesn't actually work.

Safari supports enough AppleScript (as long as you don't use tabs) to let an external process "scrape" the window urls and keep track of what is open. I don't keep track of order (though I do somewhat keep track of age, which turns out to be close enough) but basically, I keep a list of when urls appear and disappear, which can then be scraped later to provide a list of urls to reopen (possibly with hand editing first.)

• monitor_safari.py start this, and it gloms onto a running Safari and writes out a log. Read the comments for the gensuitemodule command needed to build the matching AppleScript Dictionary.
• optional monitor_safari.icns icon - you'll get the default python 16-ton-weight icon if it doesn't find this.
• reload_safari.py just takes the safari_log and spits out a list of urls; you can feed them to a while loop that calls open, or something more clever as needed. I'll eventually put uncrash_safari here but it's much more specific to my working environment than the rest of this is.