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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: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 20:19:06 -0800

At 1:16 PM +0200 10/19/02, Dietmar Planitzer wrote:
> > From: email@hidden
>>
>> Nobody wants the delay, they either want it on or off.
>>
>> As for starting a new drag I either click then drag or just drag
>>from outside
>> the selection.
>>
>> The delay is stupid.
>
>I want the delay.
>
>I've never liked how the traditional text dnd implementations worked because
>it broke consistency between applications.
>
>Before the introduction of text dnd, you could easily change the current
>text selection with the mouse. I.e. you could click inside an existing text
>selection and immediately start to drag the mouse in order to define the new
>selection. But then some third party developer decided that it would be a
>"good" idea to randomly break this behavior and overload it with different
>behavior.
>
>Since then we have two kinds of applications which interpret the same user
>gesture in different ways:
>
>Apps with text dnd. Clicking and dragging starts a drag operation.
>
>Apps without text dnd. Clicking and dragging starts a text selection
>operation.
>
>Cocoa's delay makes it possible to support both gestures at the same time
>without breaking the traditional way of handling text selection via the
>mouse.

Are you saying you use drag+drop text or not? I have yet to find
anybody who actually likes drag+drop text and also the delay, usually
if they like drag+drop text the delay just gets in the way.

I find that the delay makes drag+drop text absolutely useless. The
whole point of drag+drop text is it's faster and easier than
cut/copy+paste.

As for consistency I would have all apps implement drag+drop text
without delay. I don't see how the delay makes things more consistent
unless you're trying to make it more consistent with non-Mac apps.

>One thing that is missing in Cocoa though, is a clear feedback indicator.
>Like others already said, the cursor should change to the handcursor once
>the delay has passed by.
>
>I personally wouldn't mind a user preference which would allow anyone to set
>the delay to his personal preference. However, while this pref would work
>with Cocoa apps, Carbon developers would have to add special code to their
>apps in order to handle the pref.

I would replace the delay gesture with a contextual menu. This would
be consistent with the delay gesture in other apps.

>Now to your original questions:
>
>You should be able to change the selection behavior by overriding the
>-selectionRangeForProposedRange:granularity: method in an NSTextView
>subclass and returnig an adjusted selection range.
>
>Changing the text dnd behavior is propably harder. My wild guest would be
>that you might have luck calling the
>-dragSelecetionWithEvent:offset:slideBack: method instandly from the
>mouseDown: method if the current mouse position is inside the current
>selection range.
>
>Note that both of these problems are presentation problems. Thats why you
>should look at NSTextView and its superclass NSText in order to find
>solutions to them.

Sigh, so is it going to be possible to alter the behavior of
NSLayoutManager or will I have to write a replacement from scratch?
The mechanisms don't appear to be exposed in the public API.

>
>However, my personal opinion about this stuff is that you shouldn't do it.
>Because even if you don't like Cocoa's text behavior its still better to
>leave it as it is because at least all Cocoa's app are consistent to each
>other.

Considering I mostly use Carbon apps, building Cocoa apps which
behave like Mac apps would make them more consistent.

>IMHO, the one thing that is worse than app behavior that I don't like is,
>apps which come with their one set of rules just like it is sadly too common
>on X Windows.
>
>
>Regards,
>
>Dietmar Planitzer

I'll try follow the Mac conventions, not the NeXT ones.
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments)
      • From: Jonathan Hendry <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: NSLayoutManager vs BBEdit (Was Re: Carbon vs Cocoa arguments) (From: Dietmar Planitzer <email@hidden>)

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