Back to the clipboard, part II.

[Malte Starostik]

Am Donnerstag, 31. Oktober 2002 15:33 schrieb Havoc Pennington:
> Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> writes:
> >  I also tried with MS Windows. There's usually one selection per
> > application, so the problems with unselecting usually don't happen
> > (unless you do 'New Window' in IE, they it looks like two apps, but in
> > fact it's only one, having only one selection).
>
> I would have expected the selection to be per-window or per-document,
> it's sort of surprising that they don't do it that way.
It is per window. See below

> >  Lineedits in config dialogs unselect as soon as they
> > loose the focus. I also noted that selecting something in Notepad and
> > selecting a lineedit in its config dialog doesn't unselect the
> > edited text.
>
> This sounds like per-window though.
>
> Maybe it's one of those areas (like window placement) where Windows is
> really inconsistent. ;-)
It provides some sources for inconsistency indeed:
The selection is per window, but most windows or rather controls hide the 
selection when they lose focus. This applies to both single and multiline 
text edits as well as things like list boxes, list view etc. which hide the 
selection mark by default. This behaviour can be turned off by modifying the 
controls' styles, but not too many apps do so. This is where the main 
inconsistency comes in IMHO. Plus, some text edits will select everything 
when you tab into them, others will keep their current selection (which is 
then un-hidden again).
OTOH, as Lubos said, the selection is only a visual highlighting which doesn't 
do anything per se, it only shows what characters/items/objects an operation 
will copy, cut or modify in any way. No auto-copying, no paste on MMB (which 
is rather annoying BTW :-)
-Malte