December 5, 2017

Making the enter key stop adding two lines

Sometime in 2016, some imbeciles in the Mozilla project thought it would be a good idea to change this default behavior. The explanation, if you can call it that, is that "other html editors treat the enter key as the start of a new paragraph". My question is, "what other html editors?", followed quickly by "who cares?". One solution, insofar as it is a solution is to use Control-Enter or Shift-Enter to bypass this behavior. But there is a better way (sort of).

Tutorials tell you to use "Tools -> Options" to get an options windows. These days you just click on the three lines in the upper right (sometimes called the "hamburger icon" to get a menu and select "Preferences". Make sure the "composition" pane is selected and the "general" part of that pane.

Near the bottom is a checkbox option labelled "When using paragraph format, the enter key creates a new paragraph". De-select this and there you are, .... except .....

This option has now been changed to the much more cryptic "Use Paragraph format instead of Body Text by default". There is probably nobody on the planet who knows what this actually means, but de-selecting it does still fix the problem of the enter key producing two blank lines, so go with turning this off.

What we really want to know is, what are those people smoking?

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in computing / tom@mmto.arizona.edu