Many Mac OS apps (including Internet Explorer) use Command-Semicolon as a shortcut to the Preferences dialog. Mozilla probably should as well. This is a Mac OS standard, although it should be implemented on all platforms for consistency. To my knowledge, no other platform has a standard shortcut for Preferences, and Cmd/Ctrl/Alt-; isn't a standard shortcut for anything else, so adding this shouldn't cause any conflicts or problems.

I like this idea a lot. Confirming bug

Oh, yes. Yes yes yes. (This has been in my keyboard spec since the beginning of time.) And I don't see why this shouldn't be XP, too.

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment. thanks, Vishy

pchen

I vote for all platforms. Preferences is too hard to open quickly ;)

Any particular reason why this hasn't been implemented yet, after over a year? I'd do it myself if I could, but I'm not a developer and wouldn't know where to begin...

hey, aaronl, here's a[nother] bug to add to the access bug radar doc. :) i'll add it if you're busy. wasn't there some issue with this re: conflict with international keyboards...? reassign as needed...

The international issue is simply that the shortcut won't work on a few keyboards. However, it's still worth doing for those keyboards that can support it.

Does anybody know what existing Mac OS apps that use Cmd-; as a shortcut to Preferences do with those international keyboards? This is unfortunately not an official Apple standard, so Apple wouldn't have documentation on it. I agree if there's no semicolon and nobody knows what else to use, the shortcut can be omitted; wouldn't be any worse than it is now. The appropriate international alternatives can always be added later.

Ben, to whom should we assign bugs like this?

I'll do this. It bugs me.

cc'ing myself.

*** Bug 110719 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is there any reason why this is a 1.1 target? I recognize that it's not terribly major as bugs go, but it seems easy enough that 0.9.7 should be a reasonable target. There aren't any open issues, I don't think, from reading through this bug. Am I wrong?

Apparently it's a pain in the ass to track down exactly where this needs to be implemented. Notice the date I submitted the bug. A few search terms that might (or might not) prove useful: preferencesCmd.accesskey preferencesCmd.label key_preferences menu_preferences

Here's something that adds that binding to navigator windows. It seems a little ugly, but it works. I didn't see any way to get it installed more globally. This one only binds it in the Edit menu of navigator windows, but that seems the most useful. It can be extended later, I suspect. This works on UNIX, and assumedly win32. I would like to know if it works on Mac's, but can't test that right now. Can anyone else test this? If this isn't the right way to do it, let me know. I'll try something else. If it is good enough, any chance we can get it promoted to get into the 1.0 trunk?

Andreww, can you push this through?

patch for composer... I talked with Marlon and he said it'd be better to have "context sensitive" keybindings so that when you are in composer and use command ; it'd open with composer already chosen.... in other words, behave exactly as if you had chosen edit-preferences from the menu... so I'll include patches for each app...

Comment on attachment 91036 [details] [diff] [review] changes for composer - context sensitive pref.... obsolete. I'll create one patch with all changes instead of lots of litle patches.

Will this conflict with the eventual nirvana of bug 77855?

whenever that bug is fixed, there will need to be many places in the UI where the code should be changed to "undo" the context sensitivity. So this will simply be another component that gets updated. That will only effect the behavior of this, but this still needs to get in and behave the way the rest of the "world" behaves right now.

patch ready for review.

The patch is great as far as it goes, but it misses the mail compose window. If you put the editor line in editorOverlay.xul rather than composerOverlay.xul, you get mail composer for free (and you don't have to define a new keyset) -- but then in the mail compose window it pops up the dialog with the editor prefs open, when it probably should be the mail compose prefs, so it's probably better to do the editor part the way you already have it, and add one more line for mail compose. If you want to check these in and do mail compose as a separate patch, you have r=akkana on this part (but let's leave the bug open until mail compose is done).

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/AHIGUserInput/Reserved_an_Equivalents.html recommends Cmd+, rather than Cmd+;.

I hope that's a typo. I don't believe I've ever seen Cmd-, used for Preferences, but Cmd-; is quite common (although Apple seems determined not endorse it officially).

This RFE has a patch and a 'r' from Akkana (although it would be better to extend it immediately to the mail-compose window, to avoid another bug & patch). Can we check it in Mozilla 1.3a (1.2 is already out) ?

sure. let me refresh this patch and add support for mail compose and repost.

Safari (the new Apple-browser) uses Cmd+, so it's not a typo.

The latest iMovie and iPhoto also use Cmd-, so it looks like Apple is indeed going in this direction. A shame they decided to ignore the existing de facto standard when creating an official standard. iTunes still uses Cmd-Y, but I'm guessing this will change in the next release. Once Apple starts implementing it consistently, others will follow them, so I guess we should too.

changing summary per comment 24, adding polish keyword, and changing milestone.

ctrl-, or ctrl-; on win32? No precedent on that platform, so we should go with cross-platform consistency, unless ctrl-, is taken. I'd like to see what Apple uses in iTunes for Windows later this year...

iTunes 4.0.1 now use cmd-, too (comment 29)

iTunes for Windows uses Ctrl-, for Preferences. I recommend we follow Apple's lead on all platforms. Fixing summary to reflect this.

this bug has been fixed on mac os x 10.3 (panther) using the latest nightly and 1.7 build (20040427). it is not fixed in mac os x 10.2 (jaguar).

Note: Another RFE that would help multi-platform users is bug 579562: "Alt+T, O should open the Preferences dialog even on Linux, and Alt+E, N should open the Options dialog even on Windows".