How to Disable CTL-Return in Thunderbird

One of the stupidest keyboard shortcuts I’ve run into is Thunderbirds CTRL-Return automatic send function. Maybe I type sloppy, but I frequently CTRL-V to paste a link into a message and hit return just a little too fast to continue typing and, damn it, the embarrassing, incomplete message is gone.

It turns out I’m not the only one. I found this great link
https://web.archive.org/web/20091126055634/http://blogs.sun.com:80/LetTheSunShineIn/entry/changing_thunderbird_keyboard_shortcut

which has, itself, a link to a pretty cool plugin that lets you remap the keyboard shortcuts.
http://mozilla.dorando.at/keyconfig.xpi

But it does not (at least with Thunderbird 3.1.4 on window) list the dreaded ctrl-enter stupidkey. Now windows 7 search is astonishingly stupid (how come windows, 20 years on, still can’t give a marginal search function when back in 1990 OnLocation could return every file on my Mac, including searching by content, in a few milliseconds? Progress my ass) but I found the right “prefs.js” (eventually) at C:\Users\dgessel\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\mwwkrsno.default.

As I’d modified a few keyboard commands with keyconfig already, prefs.js had a nice friendly indicator of where I should insert my own guerrilla modification (about the middle of the file) and there I pasted in
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_send”, “!][][“);
and when I launched Thunderbird, ctrl-enter was disabled. YAY!

(The following message was a “note to self” – I typed ctrl-enter and…)

Yep. Message still here… doesn’t work.

(…noted that the message was not sent thus ctrl-enter no longer works. The fix, therefore, does work.)

If you want to customize your experience, there’s a nice command reference here
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_extension:_Thunderbird

I added CTL-ALT-RETURN as “send later” which I don’t think I’ll hit accidentally.