#139 Problems with text selection

[Chris Skeels]

I suspect that the two items reported here are related and reflect issues with text selection. Specifically, I feel that there is an issue at the interface between the highlighting of text and text selection.

1. Rectangular Edition
   Suppose that I highlight a rectangular block of text. If I now delete this block then Alpha deletes only the first line of the block and leaves the rest still there.

2. Drag and Drop
   The best description that I have is that Drag and Drop is flakey. Trying to grab a piece of highlighted text sometimes works, but more often doesn't. So the net outcome of trying to drag highlighted text somewhere is simply to change the selection of text to be highlighted (typically this is just an extnsion of the existing highlighted region. Note that this behaviour is flakey, sometimes it works perfectly. Sometimes it works perfectly if you wait for a while between highlighting of text and then trying to grab the highlighted text. I haven't been able to find any pattern.

As a final remark, This is with 9.0b4, that that is not currently a milestone option.

Cheers, Chris.

[Bernard Desgraupes]

The first part of this ticket is fixed now. Changes committed to the repository (rev. 1350). The core must be rebuilt.

[Bernard Desgraupes]

Concerning the second point about D&D, there is a small delay, when pressing the mouse button (and holding it) over a selection, before the beam turns into an arrow cursor.
I have also noticed that sometimes it refuses to work for no apparent reason: I don't see any pattern and something must be confusing Cocoa. Drag and Drop is not implemented by Alpha: it is handled entirely by Cocoa and its NSTextView class, so probably I'd say cocoa itself is flakey for that matter. Until I understand the pattern and can reproduce something, there is nothing I can do.
Marking this ticket as fixed but it will remain open.

[Chris Skeels]

Based on very limited experience, the drag and drop issue seems much improved with the latest pre-release (9.0b4). It can still take a while for the cursor icon to change but dragging and dropping by itself seems to work regardless of the shape of the cursor and is much more responsive than seen previously, which suggests that the cursor is taking longer to change than it should, i.e. whatever condition is checked to determine the shape of the cursor is being checked later in the sequence than it might otherwise be. I have no idea whether that is an Alpha issue or an Apple issue, but it seems to take longer in Alpha than other apps (even if the other apps that I am thinking of is only AlphaX).