Re: [tlug] Tip of the Day: Word Selection in Mozilla Firefox

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Sat, 19 May 2007, Josh Glover wrote:

> Typically, double-clicking in the location bar in Firefox selects the
> whole URI. This is counter-intuitive to old Unix hackers, who are used
> to double-clicking on a word in xterm to select just that word.

Actually, it's intuititve depending on your default character class
range for word selections in xterm (see the "Character Classes" section
of the manual page.) Firefox really is doing a word select, it's just
that punctuation is considered part of a word, by default. If you go and
type a space in a URL, you'll notice that double-clicking does select a
space-delimited word.

> 3. Type in layout.word
> 4. Two preferences should appear (both should default to false)
>     1. layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word
>     2. layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation
> 5. Double-click on layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word to toggle
> it to true

Actually, you want to change stop_at_punctuation to true.
eat_space_to_next_word determines whether or not, if you select a word
in the middle of a line, it will also select the whitespace at the end
of the word.

> 6. Close about:config

You don't need to do this to test; it takes effect immediately. (At
least it does in Firefox 1.5.)

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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