Under Community Review

Easier, faster selection

To my knowledge, Studio is one of the last applications not to allow more flexible ways of selecting text. As things stand, you can double-click a word to select it, but the only (mouse-based) way of selecting more than one word is to single-click and drag. My suggestions received a fair amount of support when first proposed. Basically we should be able to have selection methods like those of MS Word, the industry standard:

Idea 1
Double-click + drag to select a sequence of words in a segment. The double-clicking selects the first word, then keep mouse button pressed to select the rest. Same as in Word. Much faster, easier and less fiddly than at present and involves no keystrokes. No hunting for the right start point + confidence in knowing whole words are being selected.

Idea 2
Triple-click to select the whole segment in one go. Fast and easy.

 

  • Former Member
    Former Member

    I fully agree. I'm trialling Studio at the moment, and one of my productivity gripes so far is this shortcoming. It should be easier to select a short source phrase for a concordance search than it is at present.

    I'd support a mouse-only approach because I haven't yet found any other way to position the caret in the source segment. Especially as I have my mouse set up so that a single press on the scroll wheel acts as a double-click.

  • Daniel, this (and MANY other things) is not about personal preferences of this or that person, but about POSSIBILITIES which are a common standard in 2nd decade of 21st century... (so that in the end everybody gets actually pleased).

  • @Evzen: I have no problem with Word not selecting the space :) provided I'm given the rest of the selection methodology...!

    @Daniel: The other point of my proposal is that it allows those of us who work a lot with the trackpad or mouse to keep our selection routines away from the keyboard. My proposals are entirely trackpad/mouse-based, and they don't clash with you old DOS/PC users for whom the trackpad is still seen as the devil's spawn :))

  • Personally (as ex-translator) I prefer keyboard methods - Ctrl+Shift+Left and Ctrl+Shift+Right, for instance.

  • Will, this particular Word behavior has been clearly WRONG for years... and I just hope you don't want to pronounce obvious BUG a standard...