Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger): Another inconsistent behaviour for text navigation shortcuts

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 18th, 2005 • 11:39 am

In any word processor or text editor, if you have a document window open with a range of text already selected in it and you press option-Right, Mac OS X deselects the currently selected text and moves the cursor by one word to the right.

If any Mac OS X dialog box, if the focus is on a single-line text field, and if a range of text in the field is already selected, but the selection does not extend all the way to the end, when you press option-Right, Mac OS X deselects the currently selected text and moves the cursor by one word to the right.

In the same single-line text field, if a range of text is already selected and the selection extends all the way to the end (far right) of the field, but does not extend all the way to the beginning (far left) of the field, when you press option-Right, Mac OS X deselects the currently selected text and places the insertion point at the end of the field.

In the same single-line field, if the entire content of the text field is selected (i.e. the selection extends from the very first character to the very last character of the text field), when you press option-Right, Mac OS X deselects the currently selected text and… places the insertion point after the first word in the text field.

Similarly, if you are in the Finder and you select a file and make its name editable, the entire name is selected by default, and if you press option-Right then, Mac OS X deselects the name and places the insertion point after the first word in the file name.

I don’t know why, but, in such situations, when the entire field/file name is already selected, I would expect option-Right to deselect the text and place the insertion point at the very end of the field/file name.

Wouldn’t this make more sense? I realize that, when a range of text is selected, technically speaking there is no insertion point (there is a selection of text instead), so the insertion point is not located at the end of the text any more than it is located at the beginning of it. It’s simply not there. So when you press option-Right, Mac OS X has to deselect the selected text and decide where to place the insertion point.

But, as indicated above, in all selection situations except the situations where the entire text field/file name is selected, option-Right places the insertion point somewhere to the right of the end of the selection. It’s only when the entire text field/file name is selected that somehow, Mac OS X assumes that, when you press option-Right, you want to move the insertion point after the first word of the text field/file name.

Given that the last “word” in a file name has special significance in Mac OS X — it’s the file extension (when file extensions are visible, that is) — it seems to me that this is a pretty arbitrary choice on Apple’s part. When I am editing a file name in a text field (in a “Save As” dialog box, for example) or in a file name box in the Finder, I often want to make changes to the end portion of the file name, i.e. the file extension (especially since Mac OS X’s handling of file extensions is still so lousy). So when the entire file name is selected and I press option-Right, I expect Mac OS X to place the insertion point at the very end of the file name.


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