#1558 Win10: Highlight by double click does not work like expected

[M Keppler]

Issue description:
When using PW Safe on a Windows 10 machine Rel. 19043 (can only assume this to happen as well on other versions) I see the following happen when clicking into entries having more than one word in Title, User Name or Password: When clicking on any but the last word, the blank after the word is highlighted as well. When copying, the blank is copied as well.

Going to the notes field it get's really weird upon double click: Numbers are only partially highlighted and copied, some special characters also appear to end the highlighting by functioning as separation characters.

Examples see attachments.

Background of usage:
Sometimes more than one word is needed to provide some context to a field, then I just use more than one word per field. Especially in the notes this is the case. All kind of special characters appear to be used in passwords. Nevertheless, highlighting by double click to copy is a frequently used habit that I would propose to support properly.

Proposed fix:
Implement your own highlighting upon double click: Start at cursor location and search forward and stop either at end of the text field or just before a blank appears. This is the end of the highlight section. Do the same searching back to stop either at beginning of text field or just before a blank appears. This is the beginning of the highlight section.

MANY THANKS FOR LONG YEAR DEVELOPMENT OF PASSWORD SAFE!

[M Keppler]

Let me please attach another example showing the behavior upon double click with special characters in the password field.

By the way, treatment of the special characters when highlighting by double click might be language dependent when using standard Windows methods, my language is German.

[Rony Shapiro]

Thanks for reporting this.
On what version of PasswordSafe does this occur? (Note that 3.59 was recently released.)

[M Keppler]

Rony, thanks for super fast response.

Sorry for not mentioning - I reported this with V3.58.

Just updated to V3.59 and indeed some things are improved :-)

Improved (not able to reproduce any longer):

• partial highlighting of long number strings: appears to be fixed
• adding the blanks to highlighting at the end: appears to be fixed

Not yet improved by 3.59:

• several special characters (probably language dependent) work as seperation characters and lead to partial highlighting only (see image 048.png added yesterday, this behaviour remains unchanged and still can be reproduced)

=> Would be great if this could be addressed upon next update

Many thanks for already addressing the issue with blanks / partial number highlighting!

[A M]

I can reproduce partial highlighting between - and \ from your image 084 on the en-US Windows 10, too. But I thought this has been general Windows behavior for a long time. Curious if you see it work properly in pwsafe before?

Just in case the goal for double clicking on the password is to copy it to clipboard... Did you know that single click on the label of individual fields (e.g., Tittle:, Username:, Password:) copies the value of that field to clipboard?

[M Keppler]

Hi AM,

thanks for reproduction with US system.

This highlighting behaviour probably is general windows behavior. And I saw this in pwsafe before as well, but was never really happy in how it worked.

Single click to copy is known but in some cases this just does not solve the problem:

• Some data sets organized in pwsafe do not fit into the standard scheme of title - username - password, e.g. bank accounts. They use several passwords for activation, for login, for two step login, for transaction approval etc. Without having a reference to the exact term used by the bank together with the password itself I am lost after a while. Solution: Write the term used by the bank together with the PW into the data field. => And label click to copy does not work any longer, because it copies the term as well. Instead: Double click onto the PW string to highlight to copy. But this only works reliably without special characters.

• Same applies to my computer network secret data: provider access data, login into the router, WiFi keys for both internal and guest network, login into the access points etc. All this reasonably only fits into the notes field. Ending with same issue like described above.

=> Am I the only one using PW safe like this? Am I the only one who would profit from the described change - even if moving away from the Windows standard?

[A M]

Ah, I see. Indeed. I solved this problem (without actually thinking about it too much) by putting every password or key in a separate entry. For example, I have a group for the router, and this group has individual entries for admin login, wifi networks, etc. This way I almost never have to reveal the password field. Some information still goes to the notes, of course. But the remaining information usually is needed very rarely.

I will let the maintainers think about the proposed highlight change :-)

[M Keppler]

OK, let's see and keep fingers crossed.

So probably this is more a feature than a bug...

Is there anything that needs to be done to address this to the maintainers? (Sorry, I am not so familiar with the workflow here...)

Thanks again!

[Rony Shapiro]

As noted, this is general Windows behavior. In other words, the problem's in Microsoft's code, not PasswordSafe's.