[pilif]

> You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well.

not on my machine. As I said, I used ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict to change it. If the OS provides a way to change defaults, I expect applications to respect that too - no matter the historical reasons.

> >in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works

> cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.

Yes, but Command-Left/Right is something that worked on the Mac even since before OSX. I, again, see no reason why it wouldn't work here.

[vvhn]

If the application overrides the defaults (which is fairly common ), your changing the defaults does nothing (for that application and for the keys that might have been overridden). It sounds like Firefox overrides the defaults completely but in it's override "map" keeps some of the functionality the same as the default.

I havn't used it but this claims it will change the Firefox behaviour as well (specifically make them behave like windows for the home and end keys)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyfixer/

I think cmd-left and cmd-right are used by Firefox for " back" and "forward" so those never work on Firefox (unless perhaps you go find where Firefox specifies its key bindings and change them)

[vvhn]

Better link

http://www-archive.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#keys

sounds like

cmd_beginLine cmd_endLine

are what you need to modify in the example given

  <binding id="editorUser">
    <handlers>
      <handler event="keypress" key="w" modifiers="control"
       command="cmd_deleteWordBackward"/>
    </handlers>
  </binding>