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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    standardizing modes of text selection
From:       Leo Savernik <l.savernik () aon ! at>
Date:       2004-03-17 18:23:31
Message-ID: 200403171923.46707.l.savernik () aon ! at
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Hello,

Time that I pollute this list, too ;-)

All KDE applications should support standard modes of text selection (with 
text I mean text and embedded objects). I therefore propose to support the 
following modes and how they should behave:

Click: The old selection is cleared, no text is selected. Dragging extends the 
new selection by characters.

Doubleclick: The old selection is cleared, and the current word is selected. 
Dragging extends the selection word by word.

Tripleclick: The old selection is cleared, and the current line is selected. 
Dragging extends the selection line by line.

Using Shift with any of the above buttons will extend the end of the current 
selection to the point of the new selection instead of deleting it.

I derived this behaviour from OpenOffice.org, which implements it.

Here are my finding of to what degree various kde applications already 
implement this proposal (tested under KDE 3.2):

- - Konsole: The only KDE application which supports all three modes (except 
extending with Shift)
- - Konqueror: khtml only supports single and doubleclick, but cannot extend the 
selection word wise. Tripleclick will select the whole paragraph, not the 
whole line. Shift works only for single clicks.
- - Kate: click and drag is fully supported. doubleclick will select the word 
under the pointer, but it does not extend the selection word by word when 
dragging. Analogically, tripleclick selects the line, but doesn't extends it 
line-wise. Shift only works for single clicks.
- - KWord: click and drag as well as doubleclick and drag are fully supported. 
The selection is extended by character/word resp. Tripleclick will select the 
whole paragraph, not the whole line. Shift only works for single clicks.

The rationale behind this proposal is consistency, and ease of use. First of 
all, more clicks mean an advance to the next higher "level": character -> 
word -> line. Making not only the mode apply on the initiation, but also 
furthermore on the extension of the selection, contributes further to 
consistency.

Why do some applications select the paragraph instead of the line for triple 
clicks? I cannot tell it for KWord, but for khtml it was impossible to 
determine the boundaries of a line before KDE 3.2, yet it was very easy to 
determine the paragraph boundaries. However, khtml now *does* have a notion 
of a line, therefore there's no technical cause not to support the proposal.

What do you think about it?

mfg
	Leo

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