Comments on: On Anchored Selections in Windows, Gnome, and Mac OS X

By: Matt Dietsche

Matt Dietsche — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:25:52 +0000

Hey, wondering if anyone knows of a mac app that allows me to hijack the MacOSX text select parameters. I deal with a lot of copying and pasting of code and customer passwords that contain dashes, underscores and various punctuation. I would love to have double-clicking on text select everything between spaces, instead of breaking at punctuation.

By: Luke Mayes

Luke Mayes — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:36:39 +0000

Thanks for the explanation of Cocoa’s. Text selection on my mac now makes sense to me. List selection, of course, is another story. How does growing a selection in both directions (like in iTunes) ever make sense? What is a scenario where that behavior is useful?

By: Daniel Rasmussen

Daniel Rasmussen — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:10:00 +0000

Leish, both are Cocoa, and TextEdit’s behavior is how a Cocoa app would behave if it used the standard Apple-provided controls. Safari’s behavior is a incorrect, presumably due to it being implemented differently.

By: John

John — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:34:33 +0000

I’ve been liking the way my mac uses the text selection, as I often find especially in Word in Windows that the whole word selection seems rather clumsy, especially when all I want to get us part of a long URL, or a small segment of a longer word. Aslo being left haded, I usually drag from right to left.

By: Mark Wise

Mark Wise — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:44:03 +0000

List selection in Leopard drives me batty!

If I use shift+down to select a list in Finder, shift+up should =deselect= the last item rather than adding an item above the anchor.

Move down one, up reverses that. How...novel. Grrrrr!

By: foljs

foljs — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:32:56 +0000

@Igot

There is no reason why there should be an inconsistency. Yet more mental adjustments required all the time.

If those are the kind of "mental adjustments" you have to do in your workflow, then Apple did a truly truly deeply fine job.

By: pinchies

pinchies — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:19:55 +0000

@Leigh If you add in the control and option keys while selecting using shift and the arrow keys, you can get even more options with odd actions.

By: pwb

pwb — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:53:01 +0000

“placing anchor to the end of your selection is the right way. But this logic is flawed. It’s no harder to miss a character when you begin selecting text, than to miss it when you finish”

Wrong. It’s not about correcting missed characters. It’s about what makes sense!!

By: Leish2

Leish2 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:40:28 +0000

In Safari Beta 4 on OS X 10.5.6 - I presume this is cocoa but I could well be wrong: • If you select-drag text then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow. • If you double click to select a single word then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow starting from the EXACT point of the cursor when double clicking. • triple click selects a paragraph and then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow starting from the EXACT point of the cursor when triple clicking.

In TextEdit - which I guess is not Cocoa since it behaves differently than Safari but I could be wrong: • If you select-drag text then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow. • If you double click to select a single word then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow. • triple click selects a paragraph and then shift+arrow selects more text in the direction of the arrow.

I like the way TextEdit workst Safari could be different due to the nature of HTML - I have no idea really.

Cheers, Leish

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:36:30 +0000

As indicated in my post, the most frustrating aspect of all this is the unpredictability. Maybe one day all Apple applications and even all Mac OS X applications will behave the same way, but until that day, having to constantly adjust one's habits depending on which application one is using will remain frustrating.

And your lack of explanation of the inconsistency between text selection and list selection illustrates another aspect of the problem, which is that it does not appear to have been thought through. There is no reason why there should be an inconsistency. Yet more mental adjustments required all the time.

In answer to your explanation itself, I would argue that users probably focus more on the accuracy of their clicking for the beginning of the selection as opposed to the end, for the simple reason that it's more difficult to be accurate when one of your hand's fingers is pressing on a mouse button (i.e. while dragging). The initial click is probably more accurate simply because there is no tension in the hand resulting from having to press on something.

This would have to be backed up by actual scientific evidence, of course, but I do wonder whether it has even been considered by whoever made the decision to remove anchoring in Cocoa.