Customizable Hotkeys is LIVE!! Please help us scope version 2

[KimB]

Hi, all y’all:

I’m genuinely delighted to share that, as of Release 147, you can customize Firefox keyboard shortcuts on desktop (MacOS, Windows, and Linux)!

To try it, type about:keyboard in the address bar. From there, you can replace hard-to-type or hard-to-remember shortcuts, eliminate conflicts with other software, and create a set of shortcuts that work best for you. As a member of the disability community and as a Mac user who still can’t completely erase my Windows shortcuts muscle memory (thanks, first OS!), I know from personal experience how powerful even small changes to keyboard shortcuts can be.

We intentionally built this first version as a sturdy-but-limited functional prototype so we could ship it quickly and learn from your real-world use. We’re proud of what we’ve done so far and already planning version 2 for later this year, but we want your feedback to shape what comes next.  

Some of you have championed this feature for years (and yes, your astounding 1,600 upvotes helped us to prioritize it. THANK YOU ♥️) Other folks may be trying customizable keyboard shortcuts for the first time, and maybe you’re even wondering if it’s for you. Everyone is welcome to jump into this conversation. Please ask all kinds of questions, share what’s working (or not), and let us know what you think.

A few important notes:

• Firefox hotkeys currently work best with English (US) QWERTY keyboards. Support for other keyboard layouts and versions is limited.
• Customizable shortcuts are not available yet on Android or iOS.
• This SUMO article provides additional information. 

We’re looking forward to learning with you,

Kim

[Ab01]

Thanks! Finally!

[filips123]

Some shortcuts, such as new tab (Ctrl+T), new window (Ctrl+N), are reserved, so they cannot be handled/overwritten by websites, while others, such as take shreenshot (Ctrl+Shift+S), are not, so websites can handle them or overwrite them with event.preventDefault().

I think it would be useful to have a toggle for each shortcut to let the user decide if they want that shortcut to be reserved or not.

For example, users of some online editors might want to make Ctrl+T unreserved, so the editor can handle opening new tab itself, or, for example, some other websites may overwrite Ctrl+Shift+S for their functionality, but the user might want that this shortcut always works for taking screenshots.

[BelFox]

I like this idea!

[navtik]

Will we also be able to customize the keyboard shortcut to open the sidebar (alt+ctrl+z) at some point? On many keyboard settings (us international, but non English language) this shortcut does not work as it produces æ, so does not toggle the sidebar.

[tree_frog]

Fantastic addition – a very welcome update!

I think an essential feature would be to support Firefox Sync and/or some kind of configuration file similar to user.js, so that shortcuts can easily be shared across installations. I imagine it would have to be platform-specific.

Thanks for the great improvement!

[Owwwenn]

It would be great to have more navigation shortcuts to play with: move to next/previous tab (Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab), open sidebar (Ctrl+Alt+z), and go down/up a screen (Space, Shift+Space), are some of the shortcuts I can think of from the top of my head.

[BelFox]

+1 for being able to set an alternative for Ctrl+Alt+Z (open sidebar)!

[CthosEris]

yay, it works!  was able to turn off the shift+esc shortcut so that i can use discord's "mark all channels as read" function without opening firefox's task manager.  thanks so much!  stuff like this where you guys listen to feedback is why i'm so glad i switched from chrome 🙂

[DreamC]

Would be great to allow sites to bind global system hotkeys (with permissions!). Useful for VoIP applications like Discord to mute microphone or similar stuff without the need to switch back to a specific tab.

[mkupper]

Please include support for searching the shortcut keys themselves along with searching the titles of each shortcut. For example, what does Ctrl+Shift+D do? While I can do this using Ctrl+F Find on the about:keyboard page I suspect it would be useful to be able to enter Ctrl+ ... Shift+ ... D in the search box to see what gets filtered to being visible in the list of keyboard shortcuts.

[BelFox]

What a surprise to find this very decent MVP version in a minor release! This will improve Firefox's customizability even more, THANK YOU!

Question: why isn't this listed under Firefox Labs? I thought that section of about:preferences was meant for experimental features? 

Request: open sidebar through customizable shortcut.
Bug: When pressing 'SPACE', a blank appears instead of 'SPACE'.

Suggestion: make the interface consistent with about:processes and about:config.
Mock-up attached!

[1LTLos]

THIS ONE I AM FORMALLY REJECTING BECAUSE IN MY USE THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT NECESSARY. IT MAY BE A FINE UPDATE FOR OTHERS WHO HAVE APPROVED BUT AGAIN IN MY USE, I DO NOT NEED NOR USE HOTKEYS.  SO, RATHER THAN TO RECEIVE ENDLESS REMINDERS THAT AN UPDATE AWAITS AND TO SET MY COMPUTER REGARDING UNDATES TO: 'ALWAYS ASK'  FIREFOX GOES AHEAD AND UPDATES ANYWAY FORCING THAT UNSSAVED M<ATERIALS ARE LOST THAT IS TOTALLY DISRESPECTFUL AND WASTEFUL TO ME FORCING THAT I REWORK MY LOSSES ---- SO ALONG WITH THE UPDATE THE "DISMISS" BUTTON MUST BE MODIFIED TO READ "DISMISS IN TOTAL" & NEVER TO BE BOTHERED AGAIN UNTIL OF COURSE THE NEXT UPDATE. FAIR ?  YES IT IS -- TO EVERYONE.  THANK YOU 

[BelFox]

You do realize that this was pushed in a minor release that also provided bug fixes?
AND WHY THE CAPS?

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

For information purposes.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/hotkeys-yes-please/m-p/110893/highlight/true#M42879
With Firefox 147.0 i tried about:keyboard.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/feedback-the-ai-chat-shortcut-ctrl-alt-x-can-not-be-overr...

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

A similar question https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1561795

[jrw32982]

I applaud bringing this functionality to the public. However, the current implementation is deficient in at least two ways and I cannot use it to handle my scenario.

I use Linux at the terminal and I have learned to use ctrl-shift-x/c/v for cut/copy/paste. However, in Firefox, using ctrl-shift-c activates a VERY annoying popup for DOM and Style Inspector (very annoying when it is not my intention to bring up Inspector). This forces me to be constantly switching mental models for cut/copy/paste:

• Think: "I'm using a terminal, so use ctrl-shift-x/c/v"
• Think: "I'm using Firefox, so use ctrl-x/c/v"

The current keyboard customization interface is deficient:

• I cannot map multiple key combinations to the same function (e.g. both ctrl-c and ctrl-shift-c).
• There appears to be a bug which prevents me from mapping ctrl-shift-c to Copy and/or ctrl-shift-x to Cut. I can create the mapping, but it doesn't work. However, for some unknown reason, after mapping ctrl-shift-v, I can use *both* ctrl-v and ctrl-shift-v to Paste.

[Maguillage]

When I saw this in the patch notes, I immediately went to disable whatever hotkey it was that recently got added to Alt+P that started hijacking the input I've used for one of my extensions for years, but it doesn't seem to be exposed in the menu.
At the moment my only gripe is that the list of hotkeys to adjust isn't exhaustive.

[Maguillage]

Now that I think about it, conflicting hotkeys could be a good thing to indicate from this page and/or the one for adjusting extension hotkeys. Just drop in a yellow background, a ⚠, or whatever.

[LuSk]

Kudos for this! We're missing a PiP shortcut - Default Ctrl+Shift+].

[robert5]

This looks great, thank you!
The ONE keyboard shortcut I REALLY wanted was `Collapse sidebar (Alt+Ctrl+Z)` which sadly isn't in your first version.  😢   On my Glove 80 (for my RSI) that's a really awkward key combination.
I LOVE the vertical tabs, but sometimes - especially when opening Firefox on a smaller monitor - I really need to hide it.  Disappointing that it's not in the first go round, but very excited to see progress towards this feature!  🙂

[Horrible64]

This is a great start.

I've been dying to change the side mouse button bindings.
The Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 defaults are Page Forward and Page Back.
This is too easy to do by accident, and the result can be really destructive.
I know I can disable them, but I would love to rebind them to something like Next Tab and Previous Tab.
I tried using a rebind extension, but due to extension safety limitations, you have to wait for each page to load, and that was too slow and frustrating.

I would love to be able to do this natively through Firefox in the future.

[un_l0ckd]

As others have said, this was a very nice surprise note in a minor release. Thank you!

PLEASE allow us to set a custom keybind for Firefox View with this feature. For at least one of us, this would be tremendously useful.

In general, it would be great if the available actions were exhaustive and without restriction. 

Cheers

[TheQueenOfBones]

I tried to switch my "Reopen Last Closed Tab" shortcut to ctrl+e, but it didn't end up working. It just focused on the url bar and switched my search engine to Google.

[FogCM]

Didn't work for me when I Cleared "Show All Tabs". The key binding is empty, but the shortcut still triggers the list.

[suikaz]

it seems to be explicitly listing some things, like Refresh is listed twice as it has two shortcuts, but "open address bar" (don't have English version at hand, I'm sorry) is only listed once while I believe it has 3 hotkeys (listed ctrl+l, unlisted alt+d, unlisted f6)

what I like is that it already lists commands exposed by extensions to let us manage them in a single place

it's quite usable for what it is already but personally I'd consider it an alpha release and aim to have everything listed and ability to add new entries for v1 (that you call v2 I guess)


and once you have properly enumerated the list of all possible commands to expose it like that, what about mouse gestures? still no way to replace FireGestures due to some API limitations

[myspace]

Great news! Would like to see more options but this is a good start. Thanks

[34234233]

It works too poorly to be usable. Back when add-ons still existed, we'd use VimFX  to get immediate hotkeys: "x"-only to close a tab, "t"-only to open a new tab... handily and direct! Current add-ons don't work properly to achieve this anymore — and neither does this new functionality either. It comes with two major issues: it works in text fields, defeating its purpose and becoming unusable (try to type anything with "x" closes the tab), and it disables the original shortcuts, not allowing for multiple shortcuts in place at once, as the original ones are still needed, either because of text fields or a sporadic muscle memory error. Add-ons like Shortkeys  don't work properly (having major bugs) as neither did this new feature (which, given how basic it is, should already have been implemented some 25 years ago).

The takeaway: Doesn't allow for multiple shortcuts at once in place and erroneously works in text fields for when setting up a direct letter VimFX setup.

[bugrasan]

great starting point. I would like to see it extended to commands that do not have keyboard shortcuts assigned yet, e.g. duplicate tab.

[rbottiglieri]

Please add one to start picture-in-picture. The existing keyboard shortcut is just too cumbersome.