926052 - Difficult to Copy-Paste at end of lines

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Doug Kerr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130910160258

Steps to reproduce:

Have several lines of text ending with "hard returns". (Imagine a number of "specification items".)

Try to select the last text of one line to add to end of other line(s). We do not want the hard return included. We select as "tightly" as possible.

Try to deposit the Copied text by Paste at the end of other line (before the existing hard return there). The insertion cursor is placed as "tightly" as possible after the existing text there.
 


Actual results:

1. Often the material Copied will include the hard return. When it is Pasted, an extra (unwanted) line break is introduced.

2. Often the material Pasted will go after the terminal hard return of the target line, causing a new line to be started for the Pasted text. The user then has to explicitly delete the unwanted "line break".


Expected results:

The Copy and Paste operations should follow the principles found in most text edit boxes (including the one I am writing this in):

1. A selection that ends, on-screen, with the last visible (non-space) character of a line should not include, for Copy purposes, the following hard return.

2. When the insertion cursor is placed immediately after the last visible (non-space) character of a line, Pasted text should be inserted prior to the following hard return.

Comment 1

[Doug Kerr]

The convention used in most text edit windows is that if a line end with a "hard return" (end-of-line), that is presented on-screen as a space (even though it should "theoretically" be not presented). Thus the user can easily include it in, or exclude it from, a selection, or place the insertion cursor before it or after it.

This convention is not followed in the Thunderbird Write window.

It should be.

Doug Kerr

Comment 2

[Doug Kerr]

A practical workaround is to add an overt Space to the end of every line you will be working with (as source or destination). Its a bit of work, but is straightforward, and once you have done it, the rest of the maneuvers proceed in the familiar way.

That Space, by the way, cannot be included in a selection (even if the whole line is selected, end-of-line marker and all, by dragging to the beginning of the next line)!

I ran into this problem when working with a report that consisted of 15 blocks like this:

File: Text1.txt
Encoding: UTF-8
BOM:  Yes
End of line marker: Windows standard (CR-LF)
Characters beyond ASCCI: No

I might have wanted to change such entries to this:

File: Text1.txt
Encoding: UTF-8
BOM: Yes (not a true BOM)
End of line marker: Windows standard (CR-LF)
Characters beyond ASCCI: No


So I would want to change one entry to that, Copy the " (not a true BOM)", and Paste it in after "BOM: Yes" in later entries.

It wasn't easy.

Doug Kerr