peter Liepmann Reporter
	Description • 18 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

In the compose window, Ctrl-right arrow behaves unexpectedly, unlike in other word processing software, making editing difficult.  The cursor does not stop at the end of the line, or on a blank line. It DOES stop after apostrophes. It stops after, not before, other punctuation. It DOES stop only after a space following punctuation, not after the punctuation too.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Type a few lines, with or without hard carriage returns including some blank lines.
2.Ctrl-right arrow to the beginning of a word at the end of a line, then Ctrl-right arrow again
3.The cursor does not stop at the end of the line.
4.Ctrl-right arrow to the beginning of a word at the end of a line followed by one or more blank lines, then Ctrl-right arrow again.
5. The cursor does not stop on any of the blank lines.
6. The cursor stops AFTER punctuation. 

Actual Results:  
The cursor does not stop on any of the blank lines.
The cursor stops at the beginning of the next line with text on it.  

The cursor stops AFTER punctuation.

This is particularly disconcerting if there are several blank lines, as the cursor seems to disappear.  It makes editing difficult because of the unexpected behavior.  It's the one thing that bothers me most about TBird.

Expected Results:  
The cursor should stop after spaces, BEFORE punctuation, (AND AFTER punctuation OR the space following the punctuation, if any) and at the end of a line, INCLUDING blank lines, like other software.


Notepad stops after spaces (not any punctuation at all) and at the end of a line, INCLUDING blank lines. (not consistent with other software, but better) 

Wordpad stops after spaces, BEFORE punctuation, (and AFTER punctuation OR the space following the punctuation, if any) and at the end of a line, INCLUDING blank lines.
Word97 -exactly like Wordpad.
OpenOffice 2.02 under Win 2k -exactly like Word97 and Wordpad.

If the standard behavior in the 'Nix world is like TB, then there should be an option to have it behave like 'nix OR windoze.  Best would be to have it default to the standard in the OS, with the option to change it!  This is a continual nuisance when I'm typing a long email.

	Mike Cowperthwaite
	Comment 1 • 18 years ago

(In reply to comment #0)
> Best would be to have it
> default to the standard in the OS, with the option to change it!

There isn't exactly any "standard in the OS" in Windows, except maybe for Notepad, whose behavior, as you note, is overridden by Wordpad/Word, because it's way too lame for normal use.  Notepad is nothing more than a window containing a single multi-line edit field, the basic control provided by the original Windows API (and mostly unimproved since Windows 3.0, if not earlier).

I've got windows for Opera and Metapad open here, and both program behave differently from Notepad, Word, and Mozilla.  I also have a customizeable text editor that I use as my main coding tool, and I spent a couple of days finetuning the end-of-word definitions, which are different between plain text, HTML, and program code, because various puncutation characters have different meanings in those different contexts.

I, for one, do not want the Next Word function to stop at the beginning of a blank line, I want it stop at the beginning of the next word.  The only real improvement I'd like to see is to recognize apostrophes as being part of a word, rather than end-of-word punctuation -- but, because apostrophe is also used as a quote character, it's not possible to make that distinction in a way that works for everyone.