97053 - Quadruple click should select all the form

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Pierre Chanial]

At this moment, there is no way to select all the text in the form with the
mouse unlike ns4.x.
Quadruple click should do it, as xterm does.

Comment 1

[Markus Gerstel]

Right Click / Select All =)

Comment 2

[Pierre Chanial]

<OT>
I replied via E-mail to the message bugzilla sent me
My reply did not appear.
Is there a stack, and will my message appear later? Or this feature is not
implemented in Bugzilla. In this case, has this feature been already requested?
If not, I will file a bug on it.
sorry for the spam
</OT>

Comment 3

[Markus Gerstel]

afaict there is no such feature and no such request for it..
but it sounds interesting =)

Comment 4

[Pierre Chanial]

Here is the reply:

Of course, I know it! :o)
I simply don't use the right click writing a form.
Why? persons like me that have a three button mouse generally not use the right
click button while editing text. All the Select/Cut/Copy/Paste action can be
performed with the left and middle button of the mouse and the delete button. So
should be enabled the select all.
The ability to select all the text with the mouse is possible with netscape 4.x

<OT> I filed bug 97059 for the bugzilla enhancement </OT>

Comment 5

[Pierre Chanial]

This bug is unrelated with bug 32807 that deals with html uneditable layout.
Bug 97053 deals with editable form control.
Dependency to bug 32807 removed.

Comment 6

[Akkana Peck]

I used quadruple-click a lot in 4.x, and I miss it in Mozilla.  I'm sure there
are plenty of other Unix people who feel the same way.

I don't think our event system currently handles quad clicks, so this probably
requires event work more than anything else.  If the event system passed quad
clicks, implementing the selection would be fairly easy (a lot easier than the
double- or triple- click code).

This really belongs in the event/selection group -- mjudge is the expert on the
selection code (but I could probably do that part) and saari/joki for the event
stuff.  On Unix, I looked into adding this once, and gtk didn't pass quad clicks
either, so we'd have to set a timeout and count clicks; certainly do-able but
not a one-line change.  I think mac already does the timeout, so we could borrow
code from there.  I don't know what Windows does.

Comment 7

[Pham]

.

Comment 8

[h-h]

What exactly does the OP mean? Selecting everything between <form> tags on quadruple click? I would deem that too specific and not justified.

If the OP meant doing the same thing as on Ctrl+A, I would suggest keeping as few clicks as 4 free for selecting less text than everything. Bug 369877 describes a way better approach. I can't see why the bug should depend on this bug.

Though, in my opinion, even the approach in bug 369877 should be discussed with the help of simple community surveys and research about existing software behavior.

This bug could probably be closed in favor of better bug reports about this topic.