On 3/7/06, Allan Odgaard throw-away-1@macromates.com wrote:
On 8/3/2006, at 0:17, Dr. Drang wrote:
So, unless I've inadvertently changed some setting to start this behavior, I would call this a bug.
It's by design, I may change it -- there should be lots of mentions of this in the archive.
Well, I hope the acrimonious discussion of this issue last November has not turned you deaf to my pleas. There are, I think, three very good reasons to change the current behavior:
1. History/conformity. Mr. Van Ittersum (the user whose complaint started the thread in November) was right when he said that TM's behavior with regard to double-clicking and arrowing is unlike every other Mac program currently or in the past. As I said in my first message, I started using Macs in 1985, and I have never run into this behavior before. I'm pretty sure Windows editors don't behave this way, and I know that the wonderful Motif editor NEdit (which you admire, too) doesn't. And while "everyone else does it" is not an argument that should trump all other concerns, it does mean that your user base has certain expectations, and confounding those expectations should be done only if there is a significant gain. The one advantage you mentioned in the November thread--the ability to use an arrow key as an "undo" for a mistaken Command-A--has really no bearing on what the arrow keys do after a double-click word selection.
2. Double-clicking on a word has nothing to do with any individual character in that word. This, I think, is the main problem I have with the current behavior. When I double-click on a word to select it, the character that I happen to double-click on is of no consequence to me; it doesn't even enter my mind. I'm thinking of that word as a single entity. I may delete it, I may overwrite it, I may--and this is where I ran afoul of the current behavior--call a command or macro to act on it. But I am certainly not thinking about, or even aware of, the point within the word where I first clicked.
The user interface encourages this way of thinking by eliminating the blinking cursor while the selection is active. This is a visual indication that the caret is to be thought of as smeared over the entire selection.
3. The behavior is not consistent with the way arrow keys work when a selection has been made another way. When a selection is made by dragging through text a right arrowkey press puts the caret at the end of the selection and a left arrowkey press puts the caret at the beginning of the selection--regardless of whether the drag was done from left to right or right to left. The same is true when a selection is made by shift-clicking. As far as I know, the arrow key behavior is the only behavior that cares how a selection was made.
-- Dr. Drang