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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: standardizing modes of text selection
From:       "Maxim Maletsky" <lists () maxim ! cx>
Date:       2004-03-18 13:41:44
Message-ID: 20040318134144.22479.qmail () ianwh ! ian ! cx
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Leo Savernik writes: 

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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?
 

I do also perfectly agree on standarizing this. Besides being more usable 
and consistent it also creates a more stable "feeling" of one's workflow. 

Also (a bit off topic) what about the copy/paste behaviours? I did not do 
any testing of it but have noticed that sometimes copy/paste acts funny like 
being able to paste here but not there, or allow you CTRL+V but not show the 
PASTE in right-click menu... 

m 


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