This is something that has been bugging me for years and it is time to make it STOP.
It happened to me just now in Notepad. It has happened to me on every windows computer I have ever used, but not every program. This is the most recent piece of text:
I want to select JUST “forest?”, and leave the </div> alone. But Notepad, and Wordpad, force me to select “forest?</” unless I insert a space between the “?<”.
Does anyone know why it does this, and how to make it stop? I could see how perhaps, for efficiency in the operating system, non-letters are handled differently in memory, or frequently repeated non-letters in a document are stored once and repeated as a group. Is this another “Clippy” idea by Microsoft, whereas they try to make my life easier but instead force me into baldness?
The same thing will happenif you type something like: forest?xxx
The program looks for a space to identify breaks between words. If there’s no space, the program thinks it’s part of the same word. There’s no way to change this (unless you rewrite that part of the program).
What OS are you using? Different versions of Notepad and Wordpad are shipped with different versions of Windows. I have no trouble at all selecting parts of words. I’m on XP Pro and can select a single letter in the middle of a word if I want to.
Are you using the default system font? Try using Lucinda Console if you’re not already doing so and see if that doesn’t fix the problem.
Yes, it is. It can be turned off in MS Word and in Wordpad. I have found no way to turn it off in IE, which is one of the things I don’t like about IE (I don’t use it anymore, in fact).
That behavior, BTW, only happens when using the mouse for selection. If you click at the beginning of the word and select using the keyboard, you won’t have the problem. Learning the combinations of moving and selecting with control, shift, alt, arrows, home, end, and so forth is well worth the time. It makes editing much faster.
Well, that is situational. I type 120 WPM so, in that sense editing won’t get much faster. When you are working with code you pretty much need to use your mouse to get around to different parts of the document.
I would think that someone hammering the keyboard at 120 wpm would prefer a keyboard solution to a solution that requires one to take one’s hands off the keys to grab a mouse. Obviously YMMV.
I have found that if I place the mouse at the point between the two characters and move backward, I can often avoid the “grab the whole string” syndrome. (Sometimes the selection highlight does jump out to include the whole string, but often I can avoid that.)
MMDV I could feasibly go without a mouse, but the one thing that keeps me is the loose scroll wheel in the middle. I can pretty much just flick that thing and have it land where I want it to. Pushing page-down/up isn’t as exact and is repetitive.
We’re in the same situation. I’m a 95wpm typist. When I’m writing (either text or code), I do not want to take my hands off the keyboard. It slows me down dramatically. If I have to jump around, change the previous line, erase the last couple of words, I do it all from the keyboard.
When I’m editing, on the other hand, I usually do at least some of my navigation with the mouse. Where possible, I’ll jump around using “find” or something similar, but sometimes it’s just plain faster to grab the mouse and spin the wheel.
So turn it off. Previous posters have explained how.
This design actually works well in most normal text, where spaces separate words.
A smarter design would have recognized various special characters, like (,/, etc. as word separators, also.
A really smart design would have made this customizable, like many spell-checkers are. Then each user could choose their own set of accepted separators.
Am I the only one who corrects tenses, spelling, endings, and such when editing text? It is incredibly frustrating not being able to select the “ing” at the end of a word and change it to “ed,” and I have no idea why they’d turn on such a feature by default. And I still haven’t seen anyone post a way to turn it off in Internet Explorer.
Oh, Internet Explorer. No, there isn’t any way to turn it off in IE that I’ve heard about.
I’m using Mozilla, and it doesn’t happen in this browser.
If this behavior by IE annoys you enough, you could switch browsers. But that’s a big change to make if this is your only problem with IE. (Personally, I think there are hundreds of other problems that make IE unsafe for use, but that’s a different thread.)
As you say, it’s only in certain apps. The only thing that approaches this “feature” is having to switch between Word, in which you fixed the “feature” and IE and other programs where you’re screwed anyway.
From what I understand, if you go past the point you want to stop at, then slowly go back to that point, it won’t grab the whole word, or what it thinks is the word.
