Add a table to a document using the table icon on the taskbar. The first text field in the dialog has its text pre-selected. Hit tab, and you'll notice that the next text field selected does not have its text pre-selected. Dialog text field values should be pre-selected when tabbed into.

I see this in other dialogs (on Mac); reassign to cmanske for further triage this bug is really annoying; nominate for mozilla 0.9

This was by design. You actually like this behavior? I sure don't. If this is to be changed, it would have to be for *all* textfields in all dialogs in all modules.

preselection is the default behavior on windows, linux seems to default to the current behavior (not preselection), not sure about mac.

Linux does not autoselect contents of text fields when they're focused, by default. In some dialogs, it might make sense to autoselect the contents of a text field; but that should be done by the dialog, not automatically by the toolkit. We already have a pref, "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll", to turn this behavior on in the urlbar for people who want the Windows-type behavior. If people are now wanting this behavior in text fields, too, perhaps this pref should be renamed and generalized.

While Linux (and other Unix vendors?) doesn't pre-select on focus, it does always place the caret at the end of the text in the editfield (rather than before the first character). I think this bug should be to have a preference which toggles in two ways: * always select all text in the field * always put the caret at the end of the text field (unless it's a right-to- left editfield???) This bug should also cover making both of these options work. Mac and Windows should default to the first option Linux (and presumably other flavors) should default to the 2nd option. Who wants to do this work? :-)

I see where to make the fix: in nsTextEditorFocusListener::Focus() handler, so I'll work on it.

Note: In 4.x Mac, the text in a textarea is also selected when tabbing into the textarea. Also, this behavior is consistent in that dialog behavior is the same as browser form elements. In input textfields and textareas, "select all" only happens on tabbing (not when clicking to focus--with the hacked exception of the urlbar).

P4 priority

*** Bug 47367 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

moving to mozilla1.0

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 28583 ***

verified in 4/12 build.