Emacs keybindings

[Update 2013-01-21] Do gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"

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Firefox, GNOME, Gaim, all use the gtk settings to set your keybindings. To get emacs keybindings,

1. add the line gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (create the file if it doesn’t exist), OR
2. start gconf-editor and change the /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme key to Emacs. (Note the uppercase ‘E’), OR
3. Run gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs --type string

Same thing.

There is a Mozillazine Knowledge Base article that lists which keys work and which don’t. For example, C-t is taken by “New Tab”, and it won’t work… unless you replace all your Firefox “Ctrl” things to “Alt”, by setting ui.key.accelKey to 18 (doesn’t seem to work, though). I also found, on Bill Clementson’s blog, a post called Firefox for Emacs users that describes an extension called Conkeror. Written by Shawn Betts, the author of the awesome ratpoison and stumpwm who doesn’t own a mouse, it looks very promising extreme (tried it. I wouldn’t continue to call the resulting browser Firefox. Real Firefox can still be got by typing M-x firefox, though.) A Conkeror wiki is here. More tips by Bill Clementson here.

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Gnome’s top panel: “Delete this panel”

If you right-click on the top panel in Gnome and choose “Delete this panel”, it will be gone. I know I just made an obvious statement, but… but the whole top panel is gone!
IMHO, they should do away with “Delete this panel” and instead specify which panel you are deleting. I didn’t know what a “panel” was; I though I was deleting the notification-area or something, not the whole panel itself.
More importantly, after deleting the top panel, there is no easy way to revert the changes, or to restore the panel. Restarting gnome-panel has no effect. The only way I know to get it back is to delete all the Gnome settings files and restart. (BTW, I remember there is a package (probably gnome-reset) that helps resetting to the default settings.)
They should either warn more explicitly that “this panel” means the whole bar at the top, or do away with this option entirely (or make it easily undo-able). Who would want to delete the top panel anyway?

Emacs icon in Gnome

Problem: When you start emacs in gnome, the icon displayed in the {taskbar|notification area|system tray|whatever} is not an emacs icon, but the default “empty sheet” icon.
Solution: One way to fix it is to start emacs as emacs -i. This fixes it, but I don’t know why it isn’t the default. Also, alias emacs='emacs -i' will work of course, but is there a better way? An option one could set in .emacs perhaps? I don’t know.

Anyway, I got it from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=149512.