[qutebrowser] entering in text fields

Stephen Davies (sdavies) sdavies at umw.edu
Thu Nov 23 20:59:22 CET 2017


    A group of questions regarding entering info in web forms:

    1) Pet peeve: when the focus is in a text field, I get a blinky vertical
cursor even if I'm not in insert mode. That seems really strange since afaik
"blinky vertical cursor" pretty much universally means "if you type right now,
your keystrokes will go into this field." I'd like it if I only got blinky
cursor when I'm actually in insert mode, rather than having to simultaneously
visually track the status bar. Would others want this behavior? (I guess if it
worked the way I'm describing, though, there would have to be another,
different-looking cursor when the field is in focus but you're not in insert
mode, because otherwise you couldn't navigate within the field; see #2 below.)

    2) When I'm in a text field but *not* in insert mode, I'd like to be able
to do vim-like cursor commands to move around in that field. hjkl work exactly
like I expect in this mode, but others ("0" to jump to start of line or "$" to
jump to end, for instance) do not. I tried the following config binding:

config.bind('0', 'move-to-start-of-line', mode='insert')

    but when I tried it, I got the message "move-to-start-of-line: This
command is only allowed in caret mode, not normal." Other messages make me
think caret mode isn't currently implemented. Am I stuck then?

    3) Absolutely *love* the open-editor command to drop me into an external
vim window where I can edit and save and return to page with my text inserted.
(That one feature might be killer enough to have made me switch to qutebrowser
even if it had nothing else!)  One problem, though: when I exit my editor and
return to the page as described, I want to be able to press "enter" to get it
to take my input (say I typed in google search terms in my editor, and now
want Google to do my search.) But the "enter" key doesn't seem to work in this
situation, and "escape" doesn't do anything either -- I have to go to the
mouse and press the page's submit button (which eliminates most of the
advantage of doing this operation at all). Is there a workaround anyone knows?

- Stephen


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