Drag and drop editing should be smarter

terry2 · Post by **terry2** » Fri May 09, 2003 3:44 pm

Document classes have a preference called "Include trailing spaces when selecting words". I suspect the motivation for turning on this preference is so that cut-and-paste operations relieve the user of the hassle of dealing with removing spaces from the area where words are being cut, and inserting spaces where words are being pasted. Unfortunately this setting isn't sufficient.

There are a couple of problems:

- when the words are pasted the user must ensure that the insertion point is after any spaces, otherwise the trailing spaces that were included will be multiplied;

- if the words being cut do not have trailing spaces, but instead some other terminator (a period, comma, semi-colon, etc.) then the user will prefer that leading spaces be included in the selection.

What TextPad should do is implement Smart word editing. This means that for both drag & drop editing and cut & paste editing TextPad would automatically fix spaces in the source and destination regions:

- trailing spaces would be removed from the source region; if there are no trailing spaces then leading spaces would be removed;

- a space would be inserted at the destination region; if the newly inserted words did not have a space before them, the space would be a leading one; if leading spaces already existed then it'd be inserted as a trailing one.

Smart word editing would be a document class preference that would replace the current "Include trailing spaces when selecting words" preference.

(Microsoft Word does even smarter word editing than what's described above, but a text editor such as TextPad should at least implement the above.)

athleston · Post by **athleston** » Mon May 12, 2003 2:42 am

Please post a 5-option poll as suggested elsewhere in this forum -- I'd like to vote for this !!!

terry2 · Post by **terry2** » Mon Jul 07, 2003 9:00 pm

I'm not sure whether "Enhancement Suggestions" are to be for:

New Whizzy Features
or
Subtle Quality Improvements

I, for one, am not looking for any new features. I'm appreciated of all the details that have been built into TextPad that make it such a fine program.

The suggestion I'm making in this thread is definitely a subtle improvement that wouldn't make a feature list, much less qualify for a major version number upgrade. However, I'd happily try to get our site license renewed if only this (and my two other suggestions: undo restoring selection, and proper bracket matching) were implemented.

jeffy · Post by **jeffy** » Tue Jul 08, 2003 1:20 am

Enhancement suggestions, in my opinion, are what you make them to be. A poll would be appropriate for any new or changed feature suggestion.

melvers · Post by **melvers** » Tue Aug 05, 2003 3:38 pm

I don't like this idea. First, you can never make it smart enough to know what I really want to do. Using MS Word as an example proves my point. It seldom performs a cut-and-paste the way I really want it to. Most of the time I have to go back and correct its "smart" mistakes.

Bob Hansen · Post by **Bob Hansen** » Tue Aug 05, 2003 9:11 pm

Just a reminder re Cut/Paste in Word:

A lot of Cut/Paste issues in Word happen because "Visible Characters" are turned off.

If you can see the spaces, tabs, and especially the paragraph symbol when cutting, your paste results will be better. Remember that the paragraph symbol actually contains a lot of the formatting information.

Many times you want to make sure you are not copying the paragraph symbol when cutting. But other times you will want to if you want to copy the formatting also, like when doing Outline sections.

Hope this helps.....................good luck.........