Firefox ctrl+backspace behavior on linux

I’ve always hated why ctrl+backspace wouldn’t do what I expected in the address bar of Mozilla Firefox. So I stopped using Firefox. However, one day I tried it by accident on a windows box and was astonished it did work as expected! I didn’t care that much anymore since my main browser became Google Chrome. However, Chrome became more and more of a resource hog and even their owns sites like gmail and google drive run slower than on firefox. I started using Firefox again and got annoyed again over this small nuisance.

So I started googling the issue and found out that, apparently, linux users want non standard behavior because they are used to different selection behavior than for example a windows user.

I agree that double clicking a path in a console should select the entire path but I don’t see why that should affect the ctrl+backspace behavior. If I press ctrl+backspace in KWrite, it deletes the last word. If I press ctrl+backspace in the address bar in Dolphin, it will delete the last part in the path. The list goes on.. but I will never expect ctrl+backspace to be equal to “select all and press delete” which it does by default on Firefox/Linux.

Luckily, it turns out there’s an option layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation to configure this behavior πŸ™‚ You might also be interested inΒ layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word.