Rails spinoffs - May 2008 - Stealing Shortcuts from the Browser

First off, I only need to worry about Firefox for the moment, so other
browse concerns are ... well ... not a concern.  I''m writing a helper
app for myself (hence the one-browser world) for which I want to setup
some keyboard shortcuts.  One of the one''s I''d really like to
use is
CTRL-N, which opens a new window in Firefox.  For the moment, I''ve
switched it to ALT-N, but I''m having trouble remembering the switch
and I''m spawning new windows all over the place.

So, is there a way to steal a shortcut from the browser?  Clearly,
this could be bad form under normal circumstances since you don''t want
the browser to suddenly stop working like it''s supposed to, but under
this situation, and perhaps some others, it might be useful.

Currently, to catch keyboard events, I do this ...

Event.observe("window", "keyup",
this.keyboard_action.bind(this));

... so I wonder if there''s a better element to observe that would
allow me to steal the events away from the browser.

And, in the end, it may not be possible and, in that event, I''ll just
stick with ALT-N.  I wish I could use ALT for all of my shortcuts, but
ALT-LEFT and ALT-RIGHT are back and forwards in Firefox, and my
application also uses those keys.

Thanks,
Dave Kees
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After searching around the web for a while, I found a document that
indicated observing the keydown event rather than the keyup one would
do the trick.  Sure enough, if you want to override -- perhaps block
is a better verb -- default browser shortcuts (at least in Firefox),
observe the keydown event and then just call event.stop() when you
need to.

 - Dave -
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You could also fiddle with your ''ui.key.*'' settings in
about:config
(ref: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries);
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