For a long time, I've been believing that Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, was broken when installed through pkgsrc. And I was starting to hate it.
The problem I had was that trying to scroll the page using the keyboard resulted in a cursor moving around the document, instead of scrolling the whole page. Believe me, extremely annoying behavior, since it jumped across columns unexpectedly.
My diagnostic was that I had hit some kind of compatibility problem between Epiphany and the version of Mozilla I had installed through the mozilla-gtk2 package. This belief was increased this morning when I noticed that the configuration script was not finding some header files properly. I reviewed it and fixed some problems, but the problem did not disappear.
So this evening, while surfing the net, I thought... let's search for a solution; typed "epiphany scrolling" in Google and... ta-da! There it was, the first match contained what I was looking for, a FAQ about Epiphany. Scrolled down to the eighth question from the sixth section, "Scrolling with the keyboard doesn't work, and instead there's a cursor moving around!", and found the solution.
Copying verbatim: 'You have activated "caret browsing" mode. Disable it with the F7 key.' OMG, OMG! What a stupid "problem" (if I can call it as such)! Pressed F7 and it went away. No comments. Just be aware it doesn't happen to you ;-)
2 comments:
[Originally posted at 2005-01-04 07:28 pm UTC]
What's the problem then? The browser lack of offline help? (I think google shouldn't be a dependency!)
There's a way to toggle on/off this feature from a configuration dialog?
I must admit I'm not a GNome fan nor a GNome user, but things like that (it's not a unique issue regarding this desktop, or seems so) make's me go away :(
[Originally posted at 2005-01-04 07:38 pm UTC]
I've just checked the manual ("Help -> Contents" on any GNOME application shows its associated off-line manual in Yelp, the help browser), and in the Shortcuts page, there is a reference to F7. However, there is no way to enable/disable it from the menus nor from the configuration, and even if I had looked at the manual, I couldn't ever related "caret browsing" to my problem. I just assumed it was a bug too fast. Well, or maybe it _is_ a bug: an usability one.
Oh, and BTW, GNOME is quite nice... _once_ you get used to it. Going back to a plain window manager could be a bit difficult for me now, though I used to be a big fan of some of them ;-)
Post a Comment