How to disable new tab animation in firefox

This blog post explains how to disable the short animation when a new tab is opened in Mozilla Firefox. The solution was tested with Firefox 11 on Linux, but it should work in all versions between 4 and 11, on any operating system.

This question has been asked and answered many times on the web, and most of the answers suggest toggling browser.tabs.animate to false in about:config. However, this disables animation only if there are a few tabs so that horizontal scrolling is not needed. To disable new tab scrolling animation as well, toggle toolkit.scrollbox.smoothScroll to false as well. The change takes effect in windows you open afterwards.

How to change the escape key (^A) in screen without typing it

This blog post explains how to change the escape key (Ctrl-A by default) in an instance of GNU Screen if you are unable to type that key (possibly because of a malfunctioning terminal emulator).

To change the escape key to Ctrl-B, run this command (without the leading $) within the screen you want to affect:

$ screen -S "$STY" -X escape "$(perl -e 'print"\cB"x2')"

You can change back to Ctrl-A by changing the \cB in the code above to \cA. Other escapes such as Ctrl-W and even Ctrl-C also work.

You can also change the escape key remotely (i.e. on the same machine, but outside the screen) by specifying the PID or the name or both (of the form PID.NAME) of the screen to affect instead of $STY above. Use

$ screen -list

to obtain the list of PIDs and names of currently running screens. If you have given your screen session the name foo by starting it as

$ screen -S foo

, then the command to change the escape key to Ctrl-B is the following:

$ screen -S foo -X escape "$(perl -e 'print"\cB"x2')"

All these changes take effect immediately.