Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Capitalist Lion
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Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Wednesday, August 7, 2002
14:49 - Text Handling	(top)
I like the way the Mac handles text selection and keyboard/mouse interaction with typing. Apple introduced the first paradigms for how GUI text selection should work: you select some text, and then whatever you type or paste replaces whatever is selected. Double-click in some text, and it selects the word; triple-click, and it selects the sentence, or the paragraph. Double-click a word and then drag to the next word, and it selects that whole word. Then Windows came along, and decided to make it all smarter. Like, for instance, in Word, if you double-click on a word, it selects not just the word but the space following it as well, so that if you delete the word it will also delete the space and leave you with just one space between the remaining words. And if you single-click in a word and drag to the next word, it selects the next word and* the entire first word as well. It's impossible to select just the part* of a sentence, from the middle of a word to the middle of another word, without a lot of indeterminate mouse flailing. It's amazing to me how thin a line there is between "software that tries so hard to be 'smart' that it interferes with your workflow" and "software that does what you tend to want". I like, for instance, some of the pieces of "smartness" that Apple is putting into OS X. For instance: in Mail, if you're typing a list of names or e-mail addresses into the To: field, as soon as you type enough of a name for it to identify a complete address-book entry, it fills it out for you-- standard auto-complete stuff. The rest of the address, which you haven't typed yet, is selected, so anything further that you type replaces it. Just as you'd expect. But if you type a comma, it takes that to mean "I accept that address, as you've auto-completed it; rewrite the name as it appears in the Address Book, move the cursor to the end, and let me start typing a new address". It's a special-case exception to the old strike-over text-selection tactics, and it works bloody well. And if you're typing in TextEdit or any text field, you can double-click on a word, and only that word will be selected-- not the space before or after the word. that way, if you start typing, it preserves the spaces as they were, and your new word replaces only the word that was selected. But if you delete the selected word, it also deletes one of the spaces, leaving only one. Which is what you want it to do. And meanwhile, if you place the cursor between two letters and drag to some other point in the paragraph, it won't extend the selection box beyond what you asked for-- it will select just the stuff between where you clicked and where you released. If you'd wanted it to select whole words, you'd have double-clicked before dragging. (Oh, and everything in the system uses the same text-handling engine; there's none of this "Well, text behaves one way in Word, and another way in IE, and another way in this piece of shareware that I have" stuff. With the exception of a few Cocoa-specific things like UNIX-style keybindings, everything in OS X, from the Finder to OmniWeb to the Terminal, has the same text behaviors. It's all the same code. That's why Inkwell will work anywhere in the system, even at the command line. Yikes!) It's this kind of stuff that makes publishing professionals and writers prefer Macs. The text behaviors make sense; they don't try to outsmart you. It's hard to tell whether it's this way because the designers within Apple use Windows sporadically and find out each time what horrible things Windows does that PC users are all to used to by now, that only Mac people will notice because they're used to a much more intuitive paradigm-- or if it's simply that they analyze how they themselves type and work with text, decide continuously that "This is the way it should be," and program in that direction. I can tell you one thing: if I'd had to use Word on a PC for my book, I'd have gone mad before I made it three chapters.