emacs keybindings for firefox on os x

If you are like me and have been made retarded by Emacs, you might miss the standard Emacs bindings in FireFox and/or Thunderbird. Well, never fear, there is a way to fix it. While it is pretty easy to fix on Linux, it is a wee bit of a pain-in-the-ass on OS X. So, to save some of you some time, here is themodified toolkit.jar for Firefox 1.5.0.2. Here is how you use it:

1. Get into your FireFox.app bundle – I find this easiest to do via Terminal: cd /Applications/FireFox.app/Contents/MacOS/chrome
2. Make a copy of your original toolkit.jar file: cp toolkit.jar toolkit.jar.original
3. Replace toolkit.jar with the one you just downloaded from me: mv ~/Desktop/emacs-keybindings-ffox-toolkit.jar toolkit.jar
4. Restart FireFox.
5. Enjoy the soothing balm of having Emacs keybindings work in yet another application.

I wouldn’t use this jar file with other versions of FireFox, by the way.

Update: Pete has created the equivalent toolkit.jar file for Firefox 1.5.0.3, although it looks like nothing in toolkit.jar actually changed between 1.5.0.2 and 1.5.0.3, so mine might actually still work. Nonetheless, I suspect that keeping up with weekly bugfix releases is going to be quite tedious. Which is probably why the MozillaZone folks aren’t doing it…

Update to the Update: Pete, at my instigation, has just scripted this, so we don’t have to manually fix Firefox/Thunderbird/etc. Hooray!