[SOLVED] Is there a way to set backspace to act as "up" in Dolphin?

Red Squirrel · 04-24-2020, 05:42 PM

I just nearly migrated to Kubuntu 20 from Mint 18 as I was due for an upgrade and figured instead of going with latest Mint I'd try something different.

One thing I miss and keep getting tripped up on is that backspace is acting as "back" instead of "up". I just want to go up the folder structure with it. When I try to assign it, I got an error about it being ambigious, instead of just clearing it on it's own. I then went back and cleared it manually so that back is no longer backspace, but I still get the error.

Is there something else I can try?

frankbell · 04-25-2020, 07:54 PM

I doubt you could do it just for Dolphin. You would likely have to remap the key for your entire installation, otherwise, "backspace = up" in Dolphin would conflict with "backspace = backspace" in every other application.

Red Squirrel · 04-25-2020, 07:56 PM

So it's a global thing? Where would I go to change it globally? It was already mapped to "back" in dolphin though, so I'm not sure why I can't map it to something else.

ferrari · 04-25-2020, 09:24 PM

I don't generally touch the shortcuts (the defaults work fine for me). In an effort to assist, I did investigate

Dolphin > Settings > Configure Shortcuts...

and the shortcut for the 'Back' action is Alt+Left, and the alternate shortcut is Back(space) by default. Even when removing it and then assigning the backspace key as an alternate action for the 'Up' action, I get the same error as you report. Further to that the backspace key continues to function as the 'Back' action. I also removed it via

System Settings > Shortcuts > Standard Shortcuts.

To me that is a bug (unless I'm missing something).

Red Squirrel · 04-25-2020, 09:58 PM

As a side note it seems backspace is not working in Firefox for back, but I wonder if that's because of me messing with the settings. Can you check if it's doing same for you? Just curious.

ferrari · 04-26-2020, 12:10 AM

Yes, same for me even though I have restored default shortcuts in KDE.

ferrari · 04-26-2020, 12:56 AM

Actually, I don't usually use the backspace key to roll back pages for firefox. So I'm not convinced that its behaviour changed at all. However, I note from reading this page
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action
that it can be configured via about:config to one's liking....

Quote:

Possible values and their effects
0

Pressing [Backspace] will go back a page in the session history and [Shift]+[Backspace] will go forward. (Default in Windows)

1

Pressing [Backspace] will scroll up a page in the current document and [Shift]+[Backspace] will scroll down. (Default in Linux builds before 2006-12-07)
(Other)

Any other integer value will simply unmap the backspace key. In Linux builds after 2006-12-07, the default is 2.

Mine was set to 2 (the default value). I will leave it that way.

Red Squirrel · 05-01-2020, 10:43 AM

For Firefox about:config change worked so I did that. For Kubuntu I'm starting to think it is a bug so I will wait and see if it gets fixed and mark this as solved for time being. I'll try to remember to come update this if I do find a fix though.