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I use Firefox on a Mac to access Stack Exchange. I would like Ctrl + B to move the cursor to the left, as it does in other applications (an Emacs key binding), but Stack Exchange's editor captures Ctrl + B and makes text bold which is really not useful for me. (It also intercepts ⌘ + B to make bold.)

Is there a way to disable Ctrl + B and other control characters?

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    Are you talking about the old editor, the new stacks editor (that is still in beta and is only available for answers on MSO and MSE as well as on Teams), or both?
    – 41686d6564
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 16:34
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    old, default editor.
    – xf.
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 17:10
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    There is no option to disable this using SE's stock code. You could write a userscript to get what you want. Probably the easiest way is to intercept the events for pressing that key combination and only permit the default action to be performed, rather than any event handlers which SE uses to perform the bolding. Note that you wouldn't want to prevent all such events for all such key combinations, as those events are used to trigger updating the preview. There are other possible ways to accomplish the same thing, which may be easier/harder/more elegant, but would require some investigation.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 18:00
  • Related: Really annoying WYSIWYG editor interaction with Vimperator
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 22:18
  • One would expect this to have come up before. Has it? A search on Stack Apps does not seem to return anything significant. Are there some fundamental barriers? (Or not enough hardcore Unix users? :-))
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 22:29
  • @This_is_NOT_a_forum Being a Unix user doesn't necessitate you using Emacs, or even that you're familiar with the "normal" Emacs key bindings. There are plenty of other editors available in Unix/Linux. For example, I don't see SE shipping a version which is finger-feel compatible with vi/vim either. As users of a wide variety of software, we need to be adaptable, even if we have a preference. That doesn't mean SE shouldn't provide the ability to specify the key bindings, just that the normal thing is that we humans adapt to how we're giving input, or find a way to cause it to adapt to us.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 23:01
  • One of the nice things at MacOS for EMACS users is that every text fields does the basic cursor-movement characters like ^a, ^b, ^e, ^f, ^k and so on.
    – xf.
    Commented Jan 30, 2022 at 23:56
  • Also noted in 2009.
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 12:33
  • @This_is_NOT_a_forum I guess this is the forum for common stack apps: stackapps.com Is there any way to migrate these topics over there?
    – Traveler
    Commented Jun 25, 2022 at 15:58
  • This is not a stackapps.com issue, this is a StackExchange GUI issue. There is no obvious place to discuss such things.
    – xf.
    Commented Jun 26, 2022 at 18:05

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