[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 113932] Make Select text by clicking in Margins MSO compliant

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113932

Magalaan <magalaan at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |---
     Ever confirmed|0                           |1

--- Comment #3 from Magalaan <magalaan at gmail.com> ---
Excuse me for reopening, but I beg to differ because: 

1 
it makes no sense to have the same meaning for clicking in the margin as in the
text itself. One of the good things MS did is standardizing actions throughout
Windows and MSO. Clicking to left of a row/line generally means to select that
row. It works in Word text, it works in Excel, it works in Access, it works in
tables, and other situations. It is both intuitive and efficient. 

2 
Many people have trouble with double clicks. 3 clicks to select a sentence is
absurd, 4 clicks to select a paragraph is undoable. I fail most of the times,
because the clicks have to be in the exact same pace to succeed. You can not
expect people to train for this. Besides as one click in the margin does not
select anything, they will never even discover that double, triple, quadrupple
clicking in the margin selects even more. (Not that you would want to select
more than a line). 

3 
It is not about being correct, but about what works better. MSO solution is
clearly the superior one. 
When I suggest improvements here, I often met the counter argument that it is
not MSO compatible. It is really funny that you use the same argument the other
way (We do not care about being MSO compatible). So you rather prefer an
inferior solution than the better one that is the industry standard?  

5
I work a lot with both Writer and Word. When you are editing documents a lot,
the most basic operations become the most important for efficiency as you use
them all the time. For instance when I want to format a word I do not select it
by double clicking but click in the word and choose the style. This many times
faster and much less straining as repeated double clicking puts a lot of strain
on you hands (RSI). In the same way it may seem totally futile to you, but for
heavy users like me it really makes a difference if I can select a header with
only one click and format it. Try to format a text of a hundred pages and it
will soon become clear to you what I mean. 

In practice I will very rarely use double click to select a word (only to
delete  or replace it), I never use triple click to select a sentence, and
quadruple click to select paragraphs? I would not even dare go there. I will
select a longer text by dragging like all sane people. 

6
By the way, I found more strange behavior. I use writer for logging activities
starting each entry with a creation date field (that I assigned to a key). But
whenever you double-click in the margin before a line that starts with a field,
it start to edit the field (it executes a double-click on the first word). 

7
As to tables. I was talking about selecting a single cell by clicking in the
top  left corner. That is easy to empty cells. (But I agree  with Dieter this
should be a in different report)


I do not want to make things more difficult, just easier for users. I agree we
should rather want to improve on MSO. Let me make different suggestion, that
may make the code easier as well:

SUGGESTION:
- one click in the margin selects a whole paragraph. 
- double click in margin selects a whole paragraph + empty lines

JUSTIFICATION:
- A header is always one paragraph anyway, so this works for headers as well.
You never really want to select a line as part of a sentence. (Look at this
browser, triple click select a paragraph, not a line). 
- By selecting the following empty lines as well it becomes easy to move or
delete a paragraph. 

Frankly that is all a user needs in practice. I never select lines unless it is
a whole paragraph. I rarely select sentences (and even then by dragging). I do
select paragraphs. And on editing documents I often move paragraphs to change
the logical order. All we need can simply be done with one click. 

The Word Processor is a work horse for many people like me. If you can bring
the number of clicks down, that is a huge thing. One click in stead of two or
three clicks, that is a lot of clicks over a day. It is these details that can
make a lot of difference.  

If you do not appreciate me making suggestions, please say so, and I will stop
bothering.

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