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Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments)
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Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments)


  • Subject: Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments)
  • From: email@hidden
  • Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 20:39:37 -0700

Today is not my day. Apparently AT&T's webmail is more broken than usual. Let's try this again using Eudora (grr).

> Huh? How so?
>
> 10.2 replaced the sensible double click editing of the past in Cocoa
> applications with the non-standard and total productivity destroying
> stuff that is expected in Mac OS :-)... what more do you need?
>

OK, clearly I should have been more specific, but my original email was rather long as it was.

First let me say I don't have 10.2, I'm still using 10.1.5. Also my G4 broke so I'm not in a very good position to compile anything, but if my question is answered I'll diligantly save the information for future use.

I don't think double-click has anything to do with the issue and I actually liked how Cocoa apps used double-click or double-click-drag to select a word at a time. If 10.2 fixed the issues I'm talking about then I'm sure you'll inform me.

There are basically two issues I have with NSLayoutManager:

1) I consider the text selection behavior inferior and extremely annoying.

When I select text I nearly NEVER want the trailing linefeed. In the rarest of cases that I do I will usually opt to press the 'return' key after pasting. The selection behavior in NSLayoutManager in OS X 10.1.5 is infuriating because it makes it difficult to avoid the trailing linefeed especially when selecting down on the right side (assuming we're using a western language). When I do this I have to locate the area after the last line I want selected then move the cursor into that small area.

On Carbon apps if I don't want the trailing linefeed I select down on the right, if I do want it I select down on the left. On Cocoa apps selecting down on the left or right has no difference. Thus I find the Cocoa behavior inferior.

The only way to avoid this is selecting up which behaves the same for both APIs. Since I read from left to right and up to down this is the way my brain prefers to select text. Thus I find the Cocoa behavior inconsistent.

2) The default click-wait gesture is inane.

I don't mind having a global option to turn drag+drop text off, but the delay-click (or click-wait) gesture to drag a selection is completely insane. It ends up pissing everybody off. It pisses off people who don't want drag+drop text, it pisses off people who do, and it uses a gesture which would more logically be used for a contextual popup menu! It is nearly impossible to screw it up worse than it is in OS X 10.1.5.

People who don't understand the utility of drag+drop text may not mind if the cursor would change to a hand to signify that the object is draggable. I will only add that I love drag+drop text because I can cut or copy and paste with only one mouse button and gesture instead of using the clipboard. I even find this gesture a lot faster than X11-style pasting which requires at least one more button press.

The above problems multiply if you try to select text for the purpose of dragging. I never want the trailing linefeed when dragging paragraphs for example! I usually just drag from the end of the last line to the end of the paragraph, then I can drag it to the end of another paragraph. Again, to do this with a Cocoa app I have to select up which is counter-intuitive given the direction I read.

So the question is how may I change the behavior of NSLayoutManager to change the behavior of selection, drag from within selection, and click-wait?
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments)
      • From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>
References: 
 >NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments) (From: email@hidden)

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