Bug#295004: not a bug?

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2006-05-03 12:51:23 +1000, Vincent Ho wrote:
> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 04:39:51PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 
> Hi Vincent! (Great name, by the way ;)

Hi Vincent! :)

> 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.

Yes, that's the problem.

> 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.

Yes, but it's easier with a double click, when possible (ditto when
one wants to select something that starts with a long word and ends
with a non-word character).

> 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.

Maybe, but with the current behaviour, if $ is a non-word character,
double-clicking on a space in "hello    $$$world" would select the $
characters too. So, gnome-terminal should probably have character
classes, like xterm and emacs: double-clicking on a character should
select all the consecutive characters of the same class.

> 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?

Well, at least the fact that the newline is selected as part of a
non-word selection is very unintuitive, and I don't think that people
really relies on this; I think it should be regarded as buggy.

Also, I don't think the current behavior is a good idea. AFAIK,
gnome-terminal is the only application that behaves that way.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA