Re: [Nano-devel] [RFC] selecting text by holding Shift

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Benno Schulenberg
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Last year Chris remarked [1] that it would be nice to have the Shift+Arrow 
> keys
> available for selecting text.  Recently someone on Savannah remarked [2] that
> he or she was working on this, but nothing materialized.
>
> So... now I am planning to implement this.

I think that would be great.

> Now... how should these hard and soft marks interact?
>
> 1)  When a hard mark is set, ignore Shift, just act as if no Shift is being
> held during all cursor movement.  This means that you can't set a soft
> mark when a hard mark is set.
>
> 2)  As soon as Shift is held together with a cursor key, convert the hard
> mark to a soft one.  That also means: as soon as then a cursor movement is
> done without Shift, the mark is forgotten.
>
> 3)  When Shift is held together with a cursor key, forget any hard mark
> and put the soft mark at the current position.
>
> 4)  When Shift is held together with a cursor key, temporarily forget a
> hard mark, put the soft mark at the current position, and when the soft
> mark is unset, restore the hard mark at the position where it was.
>
> The fourth option would be the most powerful, but probably also the most
> confusing.  And there will be trouble when operations with the soft mark
> delete the position where the hard mark was.  So this is not going to work.
>
> I think the first option will be annoying: the user will feel that nano
> doesn't respond to Shift.  So I think the choice is between 2) and 3):
> either continue with the existing selection, or start a new selection
> from the current position.
>
> I lean toward option two.  What do you say?

I think I'd prefer option 1, because it provides the least opportunity
for confusion. Both mechanisms can be used whenever they're the best
fit for the job at hand, without having interactions, which will, I
think, always be surprising to the user.

Cheers,

Dirkjan