Conventions for the behavior of double or triple "click to select text" features?
- by John Sullivan
Almost any mature program that involves text implements "double click to select the word" and, in some cases, "triple click to select additional stuff like an entire line" as a feature. I find these features useful but they are often inconsistent between programs.
Example - some programs' double clicks do not select the ending space after a word, but most do. Some recognize the - character as the end of a word, others do not. SO likes to select the entire paragraph as I write this post when I triple click it, VS web developer 2005 has no triple click support, and ultra-edit 32 will select one line upon triple clicking. We could come up with innumerable inconsistencies about how double and triple click pattern matching is implemented across programs.
I am concerned about how to implement this behavior in my program if nobody else has achieved a convention about how the pattern matching should work.
My question is, does a convention (conventions? maybe an MS or Linux convention?) exist that dictates how these features are supposed to behave to the end user? What, if any, are they?
