Emacs style cursor moving forward shortcut (Ctrl-F) not working in Zotero Notes

zealotrush · March 15, 2019

In Zotero notes, I can move cursor back and forth with most Emacs style shortcuts, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-B, etc. But the cursor moving forward by character shortcut (Ctrl-F) doesn't work. How can I solve this problem? Thanks!

macOS Mojave, 10.14.3
Zotero 5.0.62
No Zotero add-on installed.

insidious · January 25, 2022

Goto preferences > advanced > general and under Advanced Configuration at the bottom, click Config Editor.

Now search "keyboard" and set the value of the key dom.keyboardevent.keypress.dispatch_non_printable_keys_only_system_group_in_content to true.

Quit Zotero (via command-q or by right-clicking the icon and selecting quit) and reopen it. Now ctrl-f should be working in notes.

I somehow found this out after searching "keyboard" and flipping the values on and off, restarting Zotero for each one. Was very surprised that this actually did fix the issue.

As to why it works, apparently it's due to a web spec (https://w3c.github.io/uievents/#event-type-keypress) that browsers implemented to only fire keypress events when text is being modified (i.e. in a textbox). So somewhere along the line, Zotero is probably intercepting that ctrl-f keypress with a listener, and this option bypasses that.