696589 - Text area : triple click on a line : select the whole line, including the return

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect)

Description

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

Firefox 6.0, Mac OS X.

I mean hard line, that is paragraph.

The standard action for triple click on a line is selecting the whole line. Including the return, of course. Examples : Safari, TextEdit, TextWrangler and many others.

In Firefox, I have a text area. In it, I triple-click on a line. Firefox selects almost the whole line, he forgets the return. This is illogical and impeding. My dear Firefox, please select the return too.

See and hear screen film :
http://screencast.com/t/UNWtlYnYL

I am in Safari, editing Wikipedia. In the text area, I have a bunch of param lines. I want to add one. I triple-click any of these lines, for instance the last one. I copy, I paste, I paste again. Quick and handy. I now have an extra line, which I can edit at will.
Now, I try to do the same in Firefox. I triple-click the last param line. I copy, I paste, I paste again. Too bad ! I don't get an extra line.

Comment 1

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

Is that behavior expected on all platforms?

Comment 2

[Nicolas Barbulesco]

(In reply to Mounir Lamouri (:volkmar) (:mounir) from comment #1)

> Is that behavior expected on all platforms?

If, by "expected", you mean what I expect, then yes. :-) 
On Mac, that expected behaviour is standard.
I am now playing with WordPad and Word 2000 on Win XP Pro, and they have that behaviour too.

Comment 3

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

(In reply to Nicolas Barbulesco from comment #2)
> (In reply to Mounir Lamouri (:volkmar) (:mounir) from comment #1)
> 
> > Is that behavior expected on all platforms?
> 
> If, by "expected", you mean what I expect, then yes. :-) 

By "expected" I meant "the platform convention".

> On Mac, that expected behaviour is standard.
> I am now playing with WordPad and Word 2000 on Win XP Pro, and they have
> that behaviour too.

We have to check GTK too.

Comment 4

[Chris]

As this feature (bug?) has been around for a while I doubt there is any want to fix it but I should make the observation that I found it as a pain trying to use select and drag to do a simple re-ordering of text in message-compose window in Thunderbird 16.0.1.

Dare I suggest that two different situations (fine text editing vs. grabbing URLs) may be occurring and that there may be a need to be a way to 'allow' the user to choose if they take the line termination character with them or not?  Shift-triple-click perhaps?

Comment 5

[h-h]

On Windows 10, I can confirm that Notepad++ with its Scintilla widget and VS Code select the ending linebreak, too, on triple click.

Triple-clicking on Ubuntu 16.10:
- gedit: Even on a wrapped line, only one line of text is selected. Neither the linebreak before nor the linebreak after the selected line are selected (tested with Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V). No matter whether I triple- or double-click, the cursor is always at the START of the selection (tested with Shift+Left/Shift+Right).
- LibreOffice Writer: One sentence is selected, not including any linebreaks (but possibly word wraps). You have to use a quadruple click to select the whole logical line (a.k.a. paragraph), which doesn't include any linebreaks in the selection.
- Sublime Text: The whole logical line including the following linebreak is selected.

> Shift-triple-click perhaps?

I wouldn't recommend that.

Rather, Firefox should just keep not selecting the linebreak when the config option `browser.triple_click_selects_paragraph` is `false`. Right now, the behavior with this option being `false` is identical to gedit's behavior.

Comment 6

[h-h]

Probably helpful:
- https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/layout/generic/nsFrame.cpp#l4449
- https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/layout/generic/nsIFrame.h#l172