Disabled Ctrl+W behaving differently in "app mode"?

llinfeng

I use Vivaldi solely for its ability to disable Ctrl + W as a shortcut. This is helpful for writing on Overleaf with its Vim emulator. Upon disabling Ctrl+W at the browser level, Ctrl+W can delete a whole "word " at a time (including its trailing white space).

Yet, when I launch into Overleaf with vivaldi --app=https://overleaf.com/project_id, with the same Vivaldi profile, it takes two Ctrl+W pressings to delete, for example, "word ". The first pressing deletes the white space, and the second pressing deletes the word itself.

I wonder if I can stop Ctrl+W (or, in general, other disabled shortcuts) from behaving differently in "app mode".

Pathduck

@llinfeng Hi - I'm afraid if you use --app you're not actually launching Vivaldi, you're launching base Chromium. None of the Vivaldi specific settings apply there, including disabling Ctrl+W.

Not much to do about this at the moment

Edit: Here's a workaround, requiring an extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-keyboard-shortcut/aidbmcboeighgdnilpdljbedbbiocphj

Use that ext to disable Ctrl+W in "Vivaldi" only (not Global).
It won't actually work in Vivaldi, because Vivaldi does not use the Chromium shortcuts. But it will work when launched as App (because it's Chromium).

llinfeng

@Pathduck Thanks a lot for explaining how the --app flag works. The workaround effectively disables Ctrl+W all together. (Please advise if I was using it in a wrong way.)

I tried the Disable keyboard shortcuts extension with the following setting and find it very "intense".

In both Chrome and Vivaldi, on top of blocking the default behavior for Ctrl+W --- it blocks the entire triggering event of Ctrl+W for the Chrome browser. With Overleaf's Vim emulator eagerly wanting to catch a Ctrl+W event, well, it won't catch anything.

One note about this Ctrl+W business - with Vivaldi's default keyboard shortcut setting, I can block the browser from responding to the event of Ctrl+W presses while still being able to pass such event to the webpage. In my Overleaf use case, it is actually the Ace editor that is in charge of emulating for Vim-key-bindings.

I guess I should wait for a secrete command-line flag that loads the whole Vivaldi settings when launching an "app"?

Pathduck

@llinfeng Yes, I guess it would also block Ctrl+W for what you want it to do... so not a good solution I realise

I guess I should wait for a secrete command-line flag that loads the whole Vivaldi settings when launching an "app"?

Maybe one day the app flag will actually launch Vivaldi. I mean Brave seems to do it. But I think Brave is built differently. Vivaldi is actually an "app" itself. So not sure if it's even possible, but we can hope. A lot of users seem to like using web sites as "apps" for some reason...

llinfeng

RE: reasons why people may want to launch a webpage as an "app"... Here is my reason:

I was looking into the --app flag with an intention to launch one specific Overleaf project as a dedicated "editor session". The original plan was to find a cleaner way to do the following:

Launch Vivaldi with single-tab mode (doable with Tab-less),
Set the page to full-screen mode to hide the address bar and the tab-bar (or, there may be two other keyboard shortcuts to hide each element one at a time).

The --app flag would combine the previous two steps into one, leaving me with a window that has a skinny title bar.

Now that --app won't load other components of Vivaldi, the following workaround works for me as I only use Vivaldi for Overleaf:

Use Tab-less to keep all tabs in a window of its own, and
Disable address bar and tab bar in Settings.

Thanks again for clarifying how Vivaldi works, especially with the --app flag.

Pathduck

@llinfeng Yes, I can understand why some think it's cleaner and easier to focus in such a window. I just never understood why people wanted to use a browser-window without any features.

Here's an idea, try the --window-size argument:
vivaldi.exe --window-size=800,600 https://overleaf.com/project_id

If you then press Ctrl+F11 to turn on Native Window mode, it's basically like an "app" but with all Vivaldi's features still there.

Unfortunately, no argument to launch V in Native mode that I know of. I guess you could create a new profile set to Native, or with hidden Tab, Status and URL bars, and then launch this profile instead.