I've been struggling with problems such as selecting an item would
sometimes make a window active, sometimes not. When there are
multiple selections, right-clicking will often clear the selection
and select just the item right-clicked on, and other times do the
proper thing by not changing the selection. I finally discovered
that the problem is that whitespace is treated inconsistently when
using fill highlighting. If a window is active and you click on
anywhere on an item (including whitespace), the item is selected
(which is what I want). If its window is inactive and you click on
the item's text, the item is selected and the window stays inactive
(again, what I want). However, if you click on the item's
whitespace, the item is selected but its window is brought to the
front (not what I want). If you have multiple selections, right-
clicking on an item's text preserves the multiple selections, right-
clicking on an item's whitespace changes the selection to just that
one item. I guess my question is that is this all intentional?
Apparently so. I'm not a fan of fill highlighting, but if you use it
you need a way to deselect items even when all visible items are
selected. For example, if you Select All items in a Finder window in
List view, how do you deselect them? The entire content area of the
window is usually filled with the selection color, which leaves no
empty space to click to remove the selection.
I can tell you that it wasn't obvious to me so it surely won't be
obvious to our users.
It might be less confusing than you think. Finder windows in List
view exhibit more or less the same behavior at times, and it makes me
crazy. I'll select multiple items and try to drag them somewhere by
grabbing them in a region where there isn't any text, and end up with
only one item selected. It's really poor UI, IMO, as the entire
highlighted region has always seemed to me like it should be part of
the selected object.
Larry
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