Keyboard

keyboard” by Mark Lane on Flickr

Cmd-Alt-K on OS X or Ctrl-Shift-K on Linux or Windows will now always focus the console input line. It will no longer close the entire toolbox and you’ll have to use one of the other global toolbox commands, Cmd-Alt-i (or Ctrl-Shift-i) or F12.

Keyboard shortcuts.

They are the bane of Firefox Developer Tools engineers. Ask us in #devtools for a new keyboard shortcut to do X and you will be greeted by a chorus of groans. There just aren’t enough keys on a keyboard for everything we need to use them for.

I added a recent change to automatically focus the Console’s input line when clicking anywhere in the console’s output area (bug 960695). This spawned a series of follow-ups.

The first of these was the addition of Page Up and Page Down controls on the input line. (bug 962531). Now when the input line is focused, it will scroll the output area with page up and page down keys. If the autocomplete popup is active, it’ll scroll too. It’s a little thing that’s nice to have when you’re flipping through all of the completions for, say, the global window object.

The most important change we landed this weekend is a change to the Console’s main Keyboard Shortcut, Cmd-Alt-K on OS X or Ctrl-Shift-K if you’re on Linux or Windows. This key will now always focus the console input line. It will no longer close the entire toolbox and you’ll have to use one of the other global toolbox commands, Cmd-Alt-i (or Ctrl-Shift-I) or F12. (see bug 612253 for details and history)

Try it out. Tell us if you hate it. You can reach us here, IRC, or on the twitters.

And there’s still more to do. I filed bug 967044 to make the Home and End keys do the right thing in the Console’s input line. We have this “metabug” tracking all of the open shortcut bugs in Firefox Devtools. Are we missing any? Let us know!