GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 626696
Text selection in input boxes is frustrating
Last modified: 2017-08-25 02:07:30 UTC
Created attachment 167681 [details] Screenshot of selected text, pointer slightly below the text box In most text inputs in Gnome: I select text by clicking on the left part of the field and dragging to the right. When using a laptop touchpad getting the mouse pointer several hundred pixels past the end of the text box is easy enough but the pointer will wobble up and down a bit. Why does this wobbling up and down cause the text to flash between selected and unselected? If you look at the attached screenshots, both of a similar drag operation, in both the mouse pointer is several hundred pixels to the right of where I started the click and drag, but in the first one the pointer is below the text box and the text is selected, in the second the pointer is ten or so pixels further up and the text isn't selected. Why does Gnome do this? In what scenario is this tiny vertical difference going to be more of an indicator of my desire to select the whole text box that the comparatively very large sweep I've made with the pointer horizontally? Please change things so that as long as the pointer remains past the right most point of the text box, whether above or below it, the whole of the text remains selected.
Created attachment 167682 [details] Screenshot of selected text, pointer slightly above the text box
For me in GTK+ 3.22: * moving the cursor out of the Entry, downwards, retains the current selection * moving it out, upwards, inverts the current selection. Put differently: it selects from the current position to the 1st character. Is this what you reported, or did it always simply unselect all when above, rather than inverting the previously existing selection? It's hard to tell, because of course, your screenshots show the whole text selected, so inverting that == unselecting all. I've not looked enough into the code to ascertain whether this was intentional and why, but maybe it was, since it seems like something that might be unlikely to happen by accident.
actually: * moving the cursor out upwards selects from the start of the current selection, to the 1st character * moving out downwards selects from the end of the selection to the last char. These are arguably useful gestures to have.
A quick search and git blame shows this is behaviour from 2001, added as a result of the following bug. The correct way to protest it would be to reopen that one, but given the age of this feature, I suspect it would just get closed again. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 50940 ***
*** Bug 591607 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***