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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: standardizing modes of text selection
From:       Luciano Montanaro <mikelima () virgilio ! it>
Date:       2004-03-18 9:00:35
Message-ID: 200403181000.35111.mikelima () virgilio ! it
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On Wednesday 17 March 2004 19:23, Leo Savernik wrote:
> 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?

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I think I sent a much less detailed message 
on this list lamenting the fact that konqueror location combo does not work 
this way. The single, double and tripleclick behaviour described is consistent 
with "old style" XWindows programs. I actually find it way more useful, since
most of the time, I want to yank whole words anyway.

Another behaviour that annoys me is the "autoselection" of some of the text 
widgets, especially since the "selected" text cannot be pasted with the 
middle mouse button. 
In fact I'd really prefer the "autoselection" could be disabled in some way,
since its inconsistency. 

Luciano
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