Mac OS X (10.4): More on word selection in ‘Save As:’ field

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 10th, 2005 • 10:38 am

Yesterday, I wrote about a problem with word selection in the “Save As:” field in “Save As” dialog sheets in Carbon applications such as Word 2004 and Photoshop CS2.

Today, I have an even more reliable scenario to reproduce the problem:

  1. In Word 2004 (or Photoshop), bring up the “Save As” dialog sheet.
  2. Make sure the “Save As:” field for the file name contains a file name that’s longer than the width of the field.
  3. Using the keyboard, move your cursor to the beginning of the last word before the file extension. For example, if the file is called “Brighter Futures Together FR Priorities.doc,” place the insertion point before ‘”Priorities.”
  4. Press shift-option-Right once to select the word “Priorities.”
  5. Press shift-option-Right again. This extends the selection to the right, to include the period that follows “Priorities.”
  6. Press shift-option-Right again. This extends the selection to include the file extension “doc.” So far, so good.
  7. Now press shift-option-Right one more time.

The selection colour disappears altogether! It looks like nothing is selected, and the insertion point is nowhere to be seen.

Yet, the text is actually still selected, which you can see if you start typing something. It will replace the text that you’ve just selected. But the selection has become invisible!

Remember: This only happens if the file name is longer than the width of the “Save As:” field. If the file name is not long enough, nothing weird will happen.


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