Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Firefoxing with AdBlock Plus and Ctrl+Shift+V

So, I run the AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox (actually in every browser I use) and it's been annoying me for a while that in Firefox when I try to use "Ctrl+Shift+V" to paste unformatted text that it doesn't paste anything but brings up the AdBlock Plus "blockable items on current page" list instead.  Leaving me with no way to paste text in a "plain text" manner.  So it appears that AdBlock Plus hijacked the "Ctrl+Shift+V" key press, but did it?

So a quick google search and I learned today that you need to change the value of the "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar_key" property.  Looks like the default settings are if something is using "Ctrl+Shift+V" already (which Firefox is) it should change to "Ctrl+Shift+U" as a backup, but it doesn't.  Not sure who's problem that is, but apparently it has been mine.

So how to fix it?

  1. In Firefox (I'm using version 19.0.2 currently) you enter "about:config" into the URL bar (of a tab where you won't mind having the contents replaced).  You will get a little warning, but for those that don't know, this is what let's you muck with the configuration of Firefox.
  2. Once you have the configuration manager up, enter "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar" into the "Search:" box at the top of the page.  Now you can just look at the one setting we care about at the moment.
  3. You sill see the Name, Status, Type and Value displayed for the property.  Double click on the property line and you can edit its value.
  4. It was set to "Accel Shift V, Accel Shift U" you want to change it to"Accel Shift U"
  5. Hit the OK button to apply the change, then you need to restart Firefox for the change to work.

So, it was set to tell AdBlock Plus to use "Ctrl+Shift+V" if nothing else was, to do this action.  If something was using it, then use "Ctrl+Shift+U" instead.  For some reason it doesn't seem to count that Firefox is using that key-press. So we just said to use the "Ctrl+Shift+U" and leave the other key-press alone so that pasting unformmated text works.

Here is a link to all the details of AdBlock Plus Preferences, you can look up "extensions.adblockplus.sidebar" if you feel like it:
https://adblockplus.org/en/preferences

5 comments:

  1. Thanks, this was driving me crazy.

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  2. Thank you for this post. It's still relevant today. :)

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  3. This does not work. It stops ABP from opening but you can not paste any text using Ctrl+Shift+V. The shortcut than des nothing. Pasting text using Ctrl+V does still word though.

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  4. Switch to Ublock Origin, and it's not an issue. When I wrote this is was with and Older version od AdBlock

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