GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 426349
cannot word-select in URL bar using double click
Last modified: 2008-09-02 20:00:25 UTC
Hi, Sam Hocevar reported in Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/417836: """ This is a very old behaviour of Epiphany, but I am just trying to switch from Galeon so I'm discovering it. Most GNOME applications, including Galeon, let you select words by double-clicking them in a text entry. This cannot be done in the Epiphany URL location because a double click selects the whole area. My suggestion is to remove this behaviour, because there is no other way to do quick word selection, while selecting the URL can be done by many other means: * triple-clicking the text in the URL location (usual GNOME way) * clicking the icon in the URL location * pressing Ctrl-L In case you wonder why one would need that: selecting words in the location bar allows for quick URL hacking. Double click, change word, press enter, done. """ I personally agree with the submitter that it's surprizing to override the behavior of double click. Bye,
Created attachment 85824 [details] [review] Revert special handling of double click in the LocationEntry
I checked whether it would be easy to implement this functionality as a python plugin instead, I think it would require: - exporting EphyLocationEntry objects - adding and exporting some get_location_entry function on EphyWindow, no idea whether there can be two EphyLocationEntry in a window - adding and exporting some connect_signal function on EphyLocationEntry
I think the current double click behaviour is better because most of the time, you want to overwrite the entire URL and not a small part of it. But -- see also bug 377772.
But there are already 3 ways to overwrite the entire URL (triple click, click on icon, Ctrl-L). How is it better to add a 4th way, remove a feature that cannot be accessed through other means, and become inconsistent with all other GNOME text widgets?
Reinout> This behaviour has annoyed me for a long time and I wouldn't have even iamgined it was intentional. Word-selection in an URL is very useful to change a part of the URL, and I'd use it almost every day if it worked.
I'd like to second the application of this patch, too. It applies successfully on current trunk (r7345), with an offset.
I agree with comment #4, as people which usually use a lot keyboard (like myself) will always use CTRL+L to do the selection and people who use the mouse have other three ways to select the text, with one click, three clicks and click-dragging.
-> 2.22 due to UI freeze.
Reinout and other interface guys: now that this could be merged to trunk, what shall we do with this?
It's a difficult tradeoff, but I'm leaning towards letting GNOME text widget consistency trump ease of URL selection. Note that the main reason browsers select the whole URL on (double) click the location entry is to make it easy to overwrite. In that respect, bug 118395 is relevant. If we had a broom icon in the text entry (like the evolution search textfield) then would we worry about the number of clicks it takes before a URL is selected?
I'm all for the broom. I think it would even be a good idea to replace the useless "go to" icon by this broom.
Never underestimate the number of people who type a URL, then reach for the mouse to click the Go to button instead of pressing Enter.
Reinout: I don't think it's a good idea to add a broom icon to the location bar; we already have the clear option from the context menu and if we want we can just make a shortcut for it. Not considering that we have the document icon on the left of the address which selects (and makes easy to overwrite the content of the location bar).
@Cosimo: those options you mention are there, but they're very unobvious.
I have come to miss this, I usually double click expecting to get only a word, I used to double click for the whole url though. I changed my mind, I say go :).
Anyone strongly against this patch? I'd like to get it in for 2.24.
Committed to trunk as r8452 and to gnome-2-24 as r8453.