Re: [Usability]clipboard/selection behavior

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 05:06, Gregory Merchan wrote:

> 5) Windows(tm) allows text to be highlighted in more than one window at the
>    same time, and so users migrating from that platform may be confused
>    by the uniqueness of highlighted text.
>
> I never noticed that and don't know how or for what I'd make use of it.

Well, nothing goes onto the clipboard in Windows unless you explicitly
Copy it there of course, so it's a different model to start with.  But
one thing it's certainly useful for is being able to replace a block of
text in one document with a block of text from another without having to
worry which order to select things in.  That is, you can either do:

a) highlight text to replace in window 1, highlight replacement text in
window 2, Ctrl-C, focus window 1, Ctrl-V

or b) highlight replacement text in window 2, Ctrl-C, highlight original
text in window 1, Ctrl-V.

Whereas if you can only highlight text in one window at a time, you have
to do (b).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems