Bug#295004: not a bug?

[Vincent Ho]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 04:39:51PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

Hi Vincent! (Great name, by the way ;)

I think the central issue is what select-by-word means when you click on
a non-word character.  Right now, the behaviour seems to be that each
line is split into alternating word and non-word regions.  When you
select-by-word, it selects the entire word or non-word region underneath
the pointer.  The behaviour in your original report has a '€' on a line
by itself, so the entire line is a single non-word region which gets
highlighted.

> I don't want them to be part of a word. Double-clicking on a character
> that is not a word character should select this character only; ditto
> when double-clicking on a word and extending the selection, e.g. in
> 
>   <elem>foo (bar)</elem>
> 
> double-clicking on "foo" and moving the mouse pointer to the right
> until the right parenthesis should select "foo (bar)", not
> "foo (bar)<".

Hmm. If a user wants to select a single character, they can just select
it by hand.  This works whether it's a word character or not: if I want
to select just the 'e' in "terminal" I must select it by hand.

Also, suppose you have a line like "hello     world$$$$$bar".  It may be
quite useful to be able to double-click the space between "hello" and
"world" and highlight exactly the right number of spaces.  This is a
feature people may rely on.

For the above 2 reasons, I'm not convinced that the behaviour proposed
is inherently better.  People will have become accustomed to the
existing behaviour, so I think we should have better reasons before
changing the status quo.  Can you think of something that is inherently
wrong or buggy about the existing behaviour?


   Vince

-- 
    Vincent Ho
loki /at/ internode.on.net

"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house
of cards. Checkmate."