Control Zero!
Amazing what a relief it is to be free of what you thought was just a little nagging itch. The other day, Anne sent me over to Derek Featherstone’s list of favorite Firefox keyboard shortcuts. I was reading through them, nodding along with Ctrl+T and Alt+D, when I came to
- Ctrl + 0 “zero�
- Recently discovered. Resets text size back to default. Ultimately convenient when switching back to testing/developing from casual reading.
Wow! I’ve always loved Firefox’s ability to shrink (rarely) or enlarge (mostly) any text with Ctrl+- and Ctrl++, unlike IE’s refusal to change fonts sized in pixels — I read far too many weblogs written by young web designers, who think that 10px dark grey text on a light grey background is perfectly legible — but it’s a little annoying not being sure when you’ve reset the font size to the original. Far more annoying is the way that for some reason Ctrl plus my trackpad’s scroll bar, in either direction, very quickly shrinks text down to the minimum size. I don’t much care about having it shrink and enlarge, but when I accidently hit it, having to Ctrl++ back up to some random size around the original is a pain. No biscuit for Firefox for not giving me any way to discover Ctrl+0, and a whole boxful for Derek, for telling me the two keys that get me back to reading.
That keyboard shortcut is actually listed in the Firefox help file in the Keyboard Shortcuts page. It’s listed as ”Restore Text Size” in the table. But, I didn’t know either until you pointed it out, so thank you. Perhaps I should check the help more often, rather than assuming I already know how to use it. There’s a few other cool shortcuts listed there too.
How long has the help been there? I did look there, after I saw Derek’s post, but I’d gotten so used to the Help menu just being where you went when you needed your build string that I honestly don’t know how long we’ve had actual help.
hmm, it doesn’t seem to work when i use the zero from the numeric keypad, but does work when i use the row of numbers above the qwerty half of the keyboard.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.9
Wups, I cut that part off of Derek’s post (probably because I haven’t had a numeric keypad for several years - wonder if they still make those external ones for laptops?). And Bugzilla says… that either nobody has reported it, or I’m not using the right keywords. So far, I’m betting on me just not finding it.
And I always use the Ctrl-scrollmouse instead Ctrl-+ to get text smaller or larger, never knew this ’way-out’ though.
Wonderful.!!!
I’ve already put that up for my clients to note when they stop in next at my shortcut page. ThankYou.!!
Which is why Seamonkey is da bomb - its listed in the view menu :)
That must be how I knew of this shortcut. I’m currently a Firefox user, but I’ve been using Ctrl-0 for what seems like an eternity. It’s a very useful shortcut.
”…young web designers, who think that 10px dark grey text on a light grey background is perfectly legible…”
Check out the ”Archives section” in this weblog for a similarly worse case.
”young web designers” …eh?
Asa’s a pretty young punk, by my standards. And that’s not small at all, in the circles I sometimes travel. It does remind me of a neighbor’s kitchen, in about 1974 or so, and the text/background contrast lacks a little something, but at least it’s instructive: the main page has a title for the stylesheet, so the pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands builtin stylesheet switcher offers the very pleasant and readable ”Basic Theme,” but archive pages don’t have a title and don’t get the switcher. I hadn’t ever really noticed how that worked before.
I think I’ll crawl back into the cool blue haven of my feed aggregator now, to clutch my eyes and whimper for a bit…
Before you crawl back, Phil, consider adding titles to your stylesheet links on this site.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://philringnalda.com/styles-site.css" title=”Styled” type=”text/css” />Still, there are many untitled stylesheets in the wild, even on sites where you might expect them. Since Firefox won’t allow untitled stylesheets to be disabled, I have kept Stephen Clavering’s outdated Style Selector in my profile. It still works wonderfully—even disabling styles declared in the head of a document (though not inline). It doesn’t play nice with the new extensions menu, but I’d gather nothing made for Firebird does.
Done, thanks. I was considering whether I had any other changes I needed to make at the same time, since I think of a full site rebuild as a major event these days (though I don’t know why: who cares whether it takes 5 minutes or 20, since it’s doing it in a popup in the background?).
<Nelson>Ha ha!</Nelson> Still doing rebuilds?
You just wait: all I have to do is port eight plugins, only one of which I wrote, from Perl (where several of them use solid, tested CPAN libraries) to PHP (where… has anyone ever written a PHP to rcs(1) library?), and I’ll be rebuild-free.
We who have already made our way to the Promised Land await your arrival with breathless anticipation.
You are an optimist.
I tried converting my cumulative archive template to dynamic. It involves only standard MT plugins (well OK, it currently uses the RelativeURL plugin to turn absolute into relative URLs, and the SmartyPants plugin; but I was willing to disable those).
Unfortunately, PHP support, even for the standard MT tags and attributes is woefully incomplete. The result was a disaster. Didn’t even come close to working.
Even if I stripped out all 3rd party plugins, I don’t think there’s a single template of mine which could be converted to dynamic without supplying some PHP plugins to reproduce core MT functionality.
Me, I’d rather spend my time hacking in new features, rather than reproducing existing ones.
Really? What was failing? I didn’t get around to creating a complete test template with every single possible tag in every possible context (though I did file a bug telling Ezra he needed one ;)), but I thought I tested most of the standard tags moderately well, and didn’t run across, well, too many too serious bugs.
Try seeing how much of
(about the simplest snippet of Template code I have on my blog) actually works.
Now look at the files in
php/lib/and match them up with standard MT Template tags (for extra credit, read a few and see which standard attributes they support).You’re a brave man, Phil. I look forward to reading your account of successes or failures with converting to dynamic templates.
I converted many of my templates to dynamic with barely any problems. I do use the MTWordCount plugin quite liberally so I had to curtail my use of that but other than that I’ve had no problems.
Still, it can be a bit of a bane to set up.
And, a week later, the briefly-pulled switcher is back in, but now it only appears if there’s more than one stylesheet: with just one (titled or not) you don’t get the statusbar icon, only a choice in View ? Page Style to set No Style (which ought to be the name of any alternate I design).
THANK YOU!
Yes, I mean to have that in all caps. And now that I know that it is there, yes, it has been in the menu all the time (I’m on Moz 1.7.2). But I’ve often wanted this function, and the primary way I have emulated it in the past was to copy the URI, close the window, launch a new windows, paste the URI, and hit enter.
Aye, I only found this recently as well, much to my joy; but I found it through the menus. Must be a nightly thing.
Funky. Very funky.
It’s been visible in the View -> Text Size menu for some time (weeks) in Firefox.
–Asa
I suspect that’s why people are starting to mention it. But although I’m using 20040903 right now, I’m finding it a miserable pain for day-to-day use. No need for a lecture about nightlies and testing and compatibility and forward motion, but: 0.9.3 with a dozen plugins was absolute bliss, doing things just the way I wanted them done. Now? I’m stuck with the system tray version of the Bloglines notifier, because for some reason I haven’t quite tracked down the Ff extension isn’t working right, which means I wind up opening Bloglines in a new window because Single Window isn’t working quite the way I expect, and in that new window GMail Notifier isn’t logged in even though it is in the previous window, so unless I notice the lack of a (0) after it, it’s effectively not working, and having Edit CSS not working means that horribly designed pages with awful backgrounds are unreadable, all of which means I’m about one annoyance away from just going back to 0.9.3, instead of doing my duty and testing closer to the edge.
I’m having exactly the same grumpiness about both Movable Type and Firefox right now: I see both as platforms more than applications, and what I want from a platform is incremental change with a strong commitment to backward compatibility, not disruptive change. You do what you need to do, and they do too, and I do not expect either one of you to change. It’s just… odd that both of you are now doing things that are quite nice for brand new users, at the expense of being annoyances for longtime users, and that you’ve both gone from bug- and feature-driven releases to ”it shall be done at this precise time, even if it has a bug that makes your laptop snap closed and cut off your hands” releases.
Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts
New and longtime Firefox users may find some of Derek Featherstone’s Favourite Keyboard Shortcuts helpful. Some of you might ask, ”Well, of what use is this Ctrl + 0 ”zero” thing? How did my fonts change in the first place?” Thanks for asking! As I jus…
Wow, all this time I’ve used Firefox and I never knew this existed. Thanks!