Fortunately, on Linux, at least, GTK provides basic emacs keybindings if you add

gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

to your .gtkrc-2.0. However, some webapps think that they deserve total control over your keys, and grab key combinations for a WYSIWYG editor of some sort. And so whenever I try to edit a post in WordPress (most of them are written in emacs and then copied over), I find myself trying to go backwards a word, and inserting random <strong> tags all over my post (Because M-b is bound to make text bold, by WordPress’s editor). I finally got annoyed enough to do some source-diving, and discovered that WordPress’s editor constructs keyboard shortcuts using the HTML accesskey attribute. This is easy enough to manipulate from Javascript, so I went and wrote up a quick Greasemonkey user script. The bulk of it is a simple XPath:

    var buttons = document.evaluate('//input[@type="button"][@accesskey]', poststuff);
    var button;

You can install the script off of nelhage.com.

Let me know if you find this useful, or if anyone figures out a general way to disable (sets of) keyboard shortcuts for websites, without relying on knowing the specific tricks that a website uses.

What it is, is an emacs implemented in Javascript, for the web. This means on the one hand that it acts like emacs. Most of the basic emacs keybindings are supported — you open URLs with C-x C-f, and have buffers you can switch between with C-x b and so on.

However, what is also means is that internally, it is fully an emacs, with all the extensibility and all the other things that applies. The UI you see is just code written on top of a generic core, that implements the core emacs primitives, including

• The basic buffer datatype. But instead of being a plain text store, it’s instead a full Gecko XUL/XHTML DOM.
• A self-documenting command infrastructure and variable infrastructure, that lets you look up the documentation and definition of any command or configuration variable.
• keymaps accessible from javascript that map keys and key sequences to commands, letting you rebind any key from your configuration code, and define new modes with completely new keybinding sets

In other words, it really is not just an emacs-like frontend to Gecko/Firefox, but is a full platform on top of xulrunner for writing interactive applications in javascript/html/css like emacs.

I predict it’s only a matter of time before someone

• Adds the ability to edit local files and becomes a full text editor that can actually start to compete with emacs. At that point people will start to port things like emacs-vc and all the Nice Things we’ve come to expect from emacs, and
• Writes a mailreader for it ;)