OT - minor windows question

[narf poit chez BOOM]

you know how if you're selecting things with the mouse cursor windows will modify your selection on the fly? is there any way to turn that off? i find it almost never selects what i want.

[Fyron]

Huh?

Holding the ctrl key will allow you to select/deselect individual items to add/remove them to your current selection. Holding shift will allow you to select a contiguous group of items, starting from the Last clicked on item. Holding ctrl + shift will allow you to add a contiguous set of items to a previously selected set of items, starting from the Last ctrl-clicked on item.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

oh, sorry, should have been more specific. and it's wordpad specific, now that i'm thinking. open up wordpad, type a sentence and try to select it.

[Fyron]

Ok. It seems to select the sentence just fine for me. Can you please be more specific?

[Krsqk]

I assume you're referring to Windows's habit of highlighting an entire word when you just want a portion, or selecting a word and the following space when you just want the word. It annoys me, too. I eventually get it to select what I want by jiggling the cursor back and forth—eventually, it gets the right idea.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

i modify it's selection with the arrow keys or just use the arrow keys. but it's still annoying.

[Shrapnel]

If you try highlighting from left to right, it will highlight the whole word/phrase/sentence.

Try highlighting from right to left instead.

Also, if you begin highlighting a portion, and you catch the space before the word/sentence/phrase, it will automatically highlight the whole word, so start highlighting at the first letter.

Did this make any sense?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

yep. i take it you can't turn it off?

[Atrocities]

I don't believe you can, but then again, email microsoft and ask them.

[Will]

Go to View / Options;
Select Options tag;
Uncheck the "Automatic word selection" box.

And I find it annoying too. If I want to select an entire word, I'll select the entire word damnit, I don't want my software to be designed with the assumption that I always want to select everything (especially annoying with URLs).

[narf poit chez BOOM]

thanks.

[Cipher7071]

They're right. I usually deal with it by highlighting from right to left like someone else already said. If you think that sucks, try picking out a single letter in the middle of a word, especially a small one (not that there isn't an easier way).

How do I say this...? I think it happens because the start of a line (or word) is very close pixelwise to the start of the first letter, and it's hard to position the mouse pointer exactly where you want it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/confused.gif

And no, you can't turn it off.

[ February 14, 2004, 14:42: Message edited by: Cipher7071 ]

[Cipher7071]

Hmmm...that was clear as mud.

The main reason it happens is that at design time some dufus decided that nobody should want to select just some part of a word for editing. So it got coded to grab for the entire word, or in some mouse positions, two words, or phrase.