Emacs Keybindings in Gnome

February 21, 2007

Once upon a time, Gnome provided a way to enable Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts for editing text fields through the Keyboard Shortcuts preferences dialog. These shortcuts are incredibly useful when editing text in web forms, such as when editing a Wiki. Unfortunately, in trying to simplify the Gnome interface (for better or worse), this option has been removed. Luckily (as of Gnome 2.16.1) it can still be enabled through gconf by running gconf-editor, and changing the /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme key to Emacs.