Selecting What *I* Want to Select

Something that drives me nuts is way various applications over the years have acquired an annoying feature that means they select whole words rather than the section of text I'm trying to highlight. So instead of getting:

I want to select a piece of text

I get

I want to select a piece of text

(Usually with a preceding space just to really annoy me). Has anyone found a way to turn off this feature across all apps?

 

So if in IE you click and drag from the middle of a word into the next word, you don't find the selection start jumps back to the start of the first word?

 

Sorry, but I don't agree. Firstly, if I want to select (and copy) three letters out of a single word in IE, I can do that. The behaviour only kicks in when I want to select text spanning two words. The same applies to other apps.

Secondly, it isn't a feature of all applications; Notepad and Front Page both allow me to select exactly what I want, which in the latter case is formatted text with underlying code ( "objects ").

Thirdly, I myself have written applications that use RichText controls, and hey, guess what, I allow the user to select precisely what he/she wants out of the RichText control, something that requires no special code on my part.

Google the subject and you will find people saying it's an annoying feature of various word processors, one that can be turned off using the word processor options. I was rather hoping it was (for example) some sort of accesibility option for people with poor eye-hand co-ordination, but I've never found such a global option anywhere, and many apps (eg IE) don't offer a local option (that I can find). Someone has made an erroneous assumption about what I want to do. If I wanted to select the entire word, I would position my mouse appropriately, but quite often I don't want to select the entire word for one reason or another. If I do want whole words I usually don't want the extra space that's added (which I then have to delete in the app that's receiving the text). Sometimes the addition of that extra space causes an immediate problem in the receiving application, so I have to go via Notepad in order to get the precise text I want. It can be an almighty productivity killer at times.

 

Click where you want to split the word and drag. When the first word (the one you're trying to split) becomes completely highlighted, drag your cursor back to the first word (while still holding down the mouse button). Then drag to the right again. If I do this, dragging back to the first word will cause it to split again and then when I drag to the right the first word remains split.

The following quote is copied and pasted directly from your last post.

 

Well I'll be damned! It works in the other direction too. Thanks Zander. It's not quite how I would like things (since it requires a bit of nifty mouse action), but at least it gets around the problem in IE. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be built into the OS, as other apps don't work the same way .

 

Nice tip Zander, thanks.

One more annoyance out of the way.