Double-click text selection / highlight behavior

Discussion of features in Mozilla Firefox
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raygr
Posts: 6
Joined: December 8th, 2004, 2:28 pm

Double-click text selection / highlight behavior

Post by raygr »

Firefox differs from IE in the way that text is selected when performing "word-by-word" selecting. You do that by double-clicking and dragging.

In IE, if you double-click then drag, only whole words are selected. I believe this is standard Windows behavior. In Firefox, when you double-click, the whole word is selected, but then as you drag over new text, only individual characters are selected.

This is a convenience I've come to rely on in IE. I wish Firefox would adopt the more standard behavior.

Thanks.
Canyonero
Posts: 1407
Joined: April 25th, 2003, 11:02 pm

Post by Canyonero »

I just tried this in IE 'cause I never knew it did that. IE selects whole words whether you doubleclicked to start the drag or not. Single click will let you start the drag wherever you want, but after that you can only select whole words. At least thats how it seemed to work right now when I tried. Seems like the FF feature gives you more freedom but the IE one is a lot simpler since, how often do I select things that start in the middle of one word and end in the middle of another. Anyways, I had nothing real to add to this I guess, just clarifying.
raygr
Posts: 6
Joined: December 8th, 2004, 2:28 pm

Post by raygr »

Yes, that's right. Usually, once you drag across more than 1 word, you probably will want whole words selected.

This comes in handy if you have to copy and paste text out of table cells a lot (which I do). It's easy in IE, but in Firefox, if you are off just a tiny bit at the end of the cell's text, it selects part of the cell or table structure tags, although it looks like only text is selected. Then when you paste into something else, you get all the table stuff.
Snoopius
Posts: 4
Joined: February 4th, 2005, 3:09 am

Yes, this is what I'm looking for!

Post by Snoopius »

I want to be able to select whole words just by starting in the middle of a word and dragging past it, like in IE. Taking care to start exactly at the start of a word is a pain. Only like 1% of the time do I ever select a portion of a word!

Can we see this in the FF 1.1?
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Liverwort
Posts: 64
Joined: January 25th, 2004, 10:57 am
Location: Wichita Kansas

Post by Liverwort »

Youneed tobe in a SpAm Fr@me of /\/\Ind) for M1ddLe of WORDsEleCtion REquirements
on the other hand, you have different fingers.
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