Betalogue

A good hint today at Mac OS X Hints: When a email message you’ve received contains a URL, Mail automatically turns it into a “live” link. When the mouse pointer hovers over that link, the pointer changes to a hand symbol, and a single click anywhere on the URL opens the corresponding page in Safari or your browser of choice.

As Rob says, while this behaviour is convenient, one often has to select a portion of a URL in order to copy and paste it somewhere else. The workaround is usually to start the selection a few characters before the beginning of the URL, and then remove the extra bits later on.

Now Rob notes that if you hold the command key down, while the cursor remains a hand symbol, you can actually click-and-drag inside the URL to select a portion of it, without triggering the automatic behaviour.

Very handy. How I wish, however, that this tip would also apply to email addresses in Mail’s headers and to links in web pages in Safari!

PS: I couldn’t find a simple way to link directly to a specific hint on the Mac OS X Hints web site. What I ended up doing is clicking on “Print hint” and then removing the “&mode=print” portion in the URL of the resulting page. Still, there must be a simpler way. Am I missing something?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, December 1st, 2003 at 7:08 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.