'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2018 at 21:57, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:

> I realize I'm coming late to this party.
>
> Liam,
>
> I too am a huge keyboard afficionado, and I detest being stuck with
> using a mouse (or worse, a touchpad - ick), but i also must say that
> I've been less impressed with Windows than Linux re keyboard vs.
> mouse.  DOS and 4DOS, sure, but Windows?

Yes, really.

For instance my blind friends *all* use Windows. Too much of Linux is
inaccessible and while macOS is good, sadly many apps aren't. E.g. Mac
Office isn't as accessible as Windows Office.

The web isn't very keyboard-accessible but ordinary operation is.
There are even shortcuts invisible to sighted users: e.g. you can step
from Start button, along the taskbar _and into the system tray and
keyboard control the icons in there_ but I never found it as there are
no visible clues to where you are.

You can open (Ctrl-O), move (alt-space, M), resize (alt-space, z),
minimize (alt-space, n), maximize (alt-space, x), and close windows
(alt-f4). You can show the desktop (win-m), run CLI apps (win-r), open
Explorer (win-E), etc.

It's not as clean and orthogonal as it was in the glory days of NT
3.51 but it's the best there is.

This is why I got on OK with Windows 8. The visual clicky-clicky stuff
for the point-and-drool brigade ;-) was all different, but for a
keyboard jockey like me, it was largely unchanged.

Win10 adds virtual desktops and I really value that. Not that I
usually use Windows unless someone pays me to.

Windows has accessibility stuff most people don't know about. So does
macOS and iOS. Stevie Wonder made a great speech about it a while ago,
thanking Steve Jobs for making sure that the iPhone and iPad were as
accessible for vision-impaired people as for anyone else, and how it
was life-changing.

And it really is. I've seen it, I've used it.

Linux? Nobody much cares. There are some good efforts but they're
underfunded and unfinished, like most of Linux. A few blind volunteer
programmers can't force an industry to change.

GNOME 2 was quite accessible via Orca. GNOME 3 threw all that away as
it threw a lot of stuff away and it's only slowly being put back,
piecemeal.

Keyboard controls are great for people who can't see a small
fast-moving thing like a mouse pointer or a cursor, but they benefit
all of us.

> (I'd be more impressed if
> they hadn't changed the keyboard commands in Office 2010 or one of the
> more recent ones where, among other things, <shift>^S no longer means
> "save as".)

Oh, totally agreed. I mainly use Word 97 (under WINE) but Word 2003 is
the latest I will use. I find Office 2007 and later to be totally
unusable.

> For the record, I go back to 1980 professionally, with 2+ years of
> intense ICS education before that (plus one class of punch cards and
> line printers in 1973 - talk about fun!), and I've used vi since I was
> first introduced to it in 1986 or 1987.  Back then it was the only
> text editor available on all UNIX machines (emacs was still new, and
> I've never learned it).  I frequently evangelize the huge advantages
> of using the command line over anything in the GUI with rare
> exceptions, most of which have to do with actually manipulating
> graphics.  Keyboard power forever!

I agree, mostly.

The snag is that  we now have middle-aged highly-skilled computer
users who grew up with GUIs and have used nothing else. I have urged
my close blind friend to learn the Linux shell and use it that way,
but it's too alien to him. He's a Windows expert and *needs* menus.

So we need accessible menus and GUIs that can be keyboard controlled.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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