From: Jon Guyer (jguyer@his.com)
Date: 10 Mar 01, 15:05 EST
From: Jon Guyer <jguyer@his.com> Subject: Re: A few issues... At 9:12 PM -0500 3/9/01, David A. Scocca wrote: >(3) Text selection via the cursor keys works unlike every other Mac >application I've used--when you're holding down shift and moving the >cursor to extend a selection, some cursor movements cause your original >starting point to move rather than shrinking the selection a bit. >(Example: put the cursor after the colon in this sentence, hold shift, >and press up twice and right three times. In a normal application, the >selection will begin with the "t" in "selection" and end with the colon; >in Alpha, the selection will begin with the space after "to" and end with >the "p" in "put". I was trying to look at the preferences to see if there >was some way to change this behavior when I ran into item (1) above. Let me put one thing to rest right now. There is nothing "normal" about the applications you are used to. There is no, No, NO standard for shift selection behavior on the Macintosh. This exact subject was hashed out on ALPHA-D about three years ago and just trickled off to a merciful death on BBEdit-Talk about a day ago. /Many/ applications work the way Alpha does. Many work the way you are used to (i.e., they pound a huge rail-road spike into the "upper" location of the selection and grow or shrink from that location). I personally hate the latter behavior. You obviously prefer it. The HIG provides no guidance and there are a comparable number of inadequacies of each of them. All that said, I am not opposed to offering other /non-default/ options for shift-arrow selection in Alpha. At some point, I will probably attempt to replicate BBEdit's behavior (which is unlike any other app in this quadrant of the galaxy, so far as I can tell, is a bit hard to get used to, but which is quite powerful) and/or some variant of it. The default in Alpha should remain what it is, because that's what most of us are used to. >(5) Undo needs to be smarter about (a) preserving selection and (b) >knowing exactly what level of command the user issued. (a) does not violate the HIG but is explicitly not required. I can't say when or if it will ever be implemented. (b) is a long held wish-list item. No idea when it'll ever happen. Both will almost certainly require changes to the core application. -- Jonathan E. Guyer <http://www.his.com/jguyer/> _______________________________________________ AlphaTcl-developers mailing list AlphaTcl-developers@lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alphatcl-developers