GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 272545
Select all text vs Select all messages
Last modified: 2013-09-10 14:03:47 UTC
evolution-2.0.2-3 When viewing a mailbox, there are two frames on the right-hand side, the upper frame with the list of messages, and the lower frame which displays the currently selected message. When viewing a message in the lower frame, I can highlight some text, for example if I wish to copy and paste it into another application. Sometimes I want to highlight all the text in the message. There is a menu selection Edit->Select all, but instead of selecting all of the text, it selects all of the messages listed in the upper frame. This happens even if the lower frame has keyboard focus, and even if I have already highlighted some text there. I found this quite unexpected. In this context, Ctrl-a has the same effect as Edit -> Select all. After double-clicking on a message, a window opens displaying only the contents of that message (and a toolbar). In this window, there is no Edit->Select all option on the menus, and Ctrl-a has no effect. "Select all text" is a basic function and should be included in any text display that allows cut/copy/paste operations, especially those capable of displaying long text buffers (like e-mail messages). In the message-only window, Ctrl-a and Edit->Select all should have this effect. In the split-frame mailbox view, this functionality might need to be context sensitive (just as the effect of pressing the up-arrow is different depending on whether the keyboard focus is on the mailbox or the message frame). The Edit menu might optimally distinguish between "Select all messages" and "Select all text" operations, even if only one of these is available at any one time.
adding keywords; should be made much more clear when the menus will be rearranged (and renamed), benjamin kahn is working on this already.
Created attachment 44884 [details] [review] Here is the patch.
Fixed in CVS Head.
The patch does not address all of the issues in this bug report. It also does not really fix the problem. It just helps make it more confusing. I'm re-opening this bug, and removing the easy_fix keyword, because the fix is not that easy. Also moving this to the 2.3 milestone. I thought I did this already, but apparently not according to what's listed here. The new menu layout in 2.3 will actually fix this problem in the correct way.
changing component to "Mailer" to get rid of the UI component, also reassigning as discussed with nags... adding UI keyword.
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
In 2.3.6: (with rodneys menu re-org) Ctrl-A selects message list Ctr-Alt-A selects the message contents I suppose that fixes the bug. Closing. Re-open if necessary.