[Camino] weird interaction of Camino and Typinator

[Stuart Morgan]

On Apr 4, 2008, at 12:42 PM, Shoshanna Green wrote:
> Again, this happens *only* when Typinator expands an abbreviation in a
> text box in Camino, not when it does so in any other program,  
> including
>  any other browser, that I've tried. Can anyone explain what is
> happening here?

Typinator works by creating fake key events. In the case of your  
original expansion, here's what they send to Camino:
   shift left-arrow
   shift left-arrow
   shift left-arrow
   (paste)
   option left-arrow
   option left-arrow
   option left-arrow
   option left-arrow
   option right-arrow

The three shift-lefts will select the "mkl" you typed, the paste will  
drop in your expansion, and then each option-arrow is supposed to do a  
work back or forward.

The issue here is a difference in how a normal Cocoa text view breaks  
words vs. how Gecko's editor (which controls text boxes in Camino's  
content area) does it. Cocoa considers the last four words to be:
       >      </      a      >
which is obviously what Typinator expects; left four words and right  
one gives the correct position.

Gecko, on the other hand, comes up with:
       www.      mozilla.      com/"></      a>
so the cursor ends up before "mozilla"


Camino shares the editor behavior with Firefox, so the only way I can  
imagine that it could be right in Firefox (although I didn't actually  
check in the debugger) is if they have the Gecko word-breaking rules  
figured out as well, and they use them when sending text to Firefox.  
If that's the case, they could probably fix this by doing the same for  
Camino, so I would contact them and let them know. (That would have  
the downside of messing up expansions in the location and search bars,  
and anything else outside the content area, since those are standard  
Cocoa text fields, but they are probably less important.)

Ideally Gecko's editor would match the standard OS rules on OS X, but  
since the editor component is not really actively maintained by  
Mozilla at the moment, that's unlikely to happen in the foreseeable  
future--especially since Mac-specific behaviors are not generally a  
priority for core Mozilla development.

-Stuart