davy@RIACS.EDU (11/28/88)
Under R2, xterm and friends would highlight the current selection while you were selecting it, and then turn the highlighting off when you were done. Under R3, the selection stays highlighted until you select something else (at which point it is highlighted), or until the selection becomes owned by somebody else (as I understand it). Personally, I find this behavior "icky" - I don't like these black areas on my screen distracting me. I've tried playing with the various mouse button translations to make it behave like the R2 selection highlighting, to no avail. Has anyone figured out how to do this? Is it possible? --Dave Curry davy@riacs.edu
jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) (11/29/88)
> R3 xterm uses selections now instead of cut buffers
Yup, this is a feature: the user-interface people say that selections should
provide visual feedback to the user indicating what has been chosen. This is
different from cut buffers which just salt away the text that had been
selected.
An alternative that might be better would to be have a selection color
that would be used to display the text....
Jim garya@stan.com (Gary Aitken) (12/07/88)
> Yup, this is a feature: the user-interface people say that selections should > provide visual feedback to the user indicating what has been chosen. This is > different from cut buffers which just salt away the text that had been > selected. > I would take issue with this. The visual feedback is only important as long as the selection is central to the current operations which the user is involved in. Otherwise, it gets in the way and in fact makes negative contributions to user productivity. Seems to me it would be a lot friendlier to have it work as it did in R2, and provide a selection display client which constantly showed the current selection. This gives the best of both worlds.
rws@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Bob Scheifler) (12/07/88)
I've tried playing with the
various mouse button translations to make it behave like the R2
selection highlighting, to no avail.
If you want essentially the same behavior as R2, you can override with the
translations:
~Meta <Btn2Up>: insert-selection(CUT_BUFFER0)
~Meta <BtnUp>: select-end(CUT_BUFFER0)
Note, however, that this will just put stuff in the cut buffer, not in
a selection. We'll think about providing a way to turn off highlighting
without losing the selection.