307894 - Select All and Copy with fewer clicks

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

When I want to copy the whole text of a text input area, I need at least 4
clicks: a click to open the context menu, a click on "Select All", a click to
open the context menu again, and a click on "Copy".

The menu could include "Select All and Copy" (and "Select All and Cut" and
"Select All and Delete") to reduce the number of necessary clicks to 2. This
solution is OS-independent.

When right-clicking on a menu item, the menu could be reopened (this is a nice
feature of RISC OS applications) to allow a click on another item. This solution
would reduce the number of clicks to 3, and with easier mouse moves.

A third solution would be to provide an "auto-copy" feature (as an option, of
course): when the user explicitly selects something, the selection is
automatically copied (some applications can do this under Mac OS X: iTerm and
Emacs, so why not Firefox...).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Rather than overloading the already mammoth context menu, why not just use
keyboard shortcuts? On windows Ctrl-A then Ctrl-C selects all and copys, I
understand there are similar shortcuts for Macs.

As for the third option you mention, that is already provided by an extension as
I recall.

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

Concerning the keyboard shortcuts, there are 3 reasons:
1. It is easier with the mouse: I don't have to look at the keyboard, and I can
do the whole copy-paste operation with the mouse. Using the keyboard shortcut is
not very simple (I need to make sure not to hit the wrong key), in particular on
the Mac, where the modifier key is not the leftmost key.
2. The keyboard shortcuts depend on the OS, and as I use both Linux and Mac OS
X, I sometimes use the wrong keys.
3. The keyboard shortcuts are not written in the menu (I assume this is a bug),
so I wasn't sure.

Comment 3

[Gary Elshaw]

Keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste are in the Edit menu here.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050910
Firefox/1.4

Comment 4

[Vincent Lefevre]

I was looking at the context menu, which is the menu I generally see.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We're definitely not doing this.