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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - 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
