[TxMt] mousing issues

[Shawn Van Ittersum]

Hi Allan,

I apologize for my tone.  Sometimes I have trouble understanding the intentions of your choices.  You choose not to support emacs-style tabbing because "the role-model for behavior when it comes to TextMate is NSTextView and OS X, that should go without saying!"  And then when it comes to mouse actions, which are the legacy of the Mac UI experience, TextMate often diverges wildly from the expected behaviors of NSTextView and classic Mac OS.

When I first reported the double-click selection bug in July, you responded: "I rarely use the mouse myself, and certainly not for text editing."  But you added that others had reported the problem and that it was on a list to be fixed, so I bought your product on good faith that you would address the issue.  Yet it still remains almost four months later, while a slew a new features have been added.  I appreciate these features, but it feels like you have been ignoring requests to fix fundamental mouse issues.  Since you offer TextMate as "the missing editor for OS X," I ask you to please appreciate how important the mouse is for many of us who have used Macs for years.  I've had to adapt my own habits to get around the mousing issues in TextMate.  I've seen multiple blog postings by people who were initially amazed by your product but chose not to buy it after encountering its "quirky" behaviors.  That's a shame, especially since you don't intend for these behaviors to be quirky, since you don't use the mouse for editing and presumably don't have any mousing preferences.  The sooner you make these fixes, TextMate will enjoy more acceptance and even more success than it's received so far.

So yes, please add NSTextView emulation of arrow-left/right to mouse-initiated selections to the list.  Also please fix the double-click extend selection bug.

Shawn

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 11:13:09 +0100, Allan Odgaard wrote:
> On 01/11/2005, at 10.13, Shawn Van Ittersum wrote:
> 
>> When double-clicking the middle of a word and then pressing arrow 
>> left or right, the cursor does not start from the edges of the word, 
>> but instead from the double-click position.  This behavior is not 
>> consistent with NSTextView, or any Mac OS app I've ever used way 
>> back to System 6.
> 
> Is there a complaint/request buried in that statement?
> 
> TextMate has NSTextView as a role model, but it's not supposed to be 
> a carbon copy (that's the gerat thing about writing your own 
> software: you decide how it should work!).
> 
> Preserving the caret for word/line/paragraph/all selections is by 
> design and a feature I personally enjoy (mainly when accidentally 
> hitting cmd-A or similar, just doing arrow left/right to “undo” is 
> nice and IMHO intuitive).
> 
> Though my use of the feature is only in relation to keyboard 
> initiated unit selections. So if you wanted to request that the 
> feature was not there for mouse initiated selections, I can add it to 
> the list.
> 
>