Firebug: does the toggle inspect mode shortcut work for you?

1
votes

I love Firebug, but I get annoyed by the fact that when using "inspect mode" I cannot (i) place the mouse over the element I am interested in and then (ii) move the mouse to the Firebug pane without Firebug tracking my mouse movements while on my way there. What happens is that, between the moment I place my mouse over the element of interest to me and the moment I get my mouse onto the Firebug pane, Firebug starts displaying the HTML for the elements over which my mouse moves.

I was happy to find in the documentation that one can toggle the inspect mode on/off by pressing (http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Keyboard_and_Mouse_Shortcuts), but this does not work for me on Linux with Firefox 3.5.

Is this a bug or am I misunderstanding the purpose of this keybinding?

I am sure others have struggled with this issue. Is there another way to deal with this annoyance?

3
firebug
Are you sure that you are clicking the element of your interest when you reach it? otherwise firebug doesn't know which element's html to display and so it displays the html of the elements on which you hover as you move your cursor all along. Thanks - Mahesh Velaga
Mahesh, thank you! This sounds so stupid, but I had never actually clicked on elements while in inspect mode, since I thought that would have triggered the events associated to it. That indeed does the trick of stopping the inspect mode from tracking the mouse. : ) Now if only I could reenable the inspect mode after clicking on something using the keyboard... The docs suggest Control-Shift-C does that, but not here... - laramichaels
I suggested the same in my answer and people down voted it!, how Ironic, glad that your problem is solved :) - Mahesh Velaga

3 Answers

2
votes

To test, I opened Firebug, then typed a letter in the "Add a tag to ignore" box here on stack overflow. When the autocomplete appeared, I hovered over an autocomplete suggestion, and typed ctrl-shift-c, which did indeed inspect the <li> element for me. This is FF 3.5.5, Firebug 1.4.5.

It occurs to me that you may have ctrl-shift-c bound to something in your X Windows configuration. Worth checking.

2
votes

Mystery solved: this was happening because I had another Firefox extension (Web Developer) installed, which by default binds Control-Shift-C to displaying the CSS for a page. I guess these two amazing extensions must be a frequent combination on many peoples FF setup, so perhaps the devs could agree on non-overlapping default keyboard shortcuts!

0
votes

Either the Web Developer addon has control of the shortcut, or the height of the Firebug is reduced to appear almost invisible, so expand the UI from the bottom.