Question about marking text and mouse movement

[Raziel]

This is something i wanted to ask for a long time

Say you got a huge text displayed in Multivew or Notepad or wherever and want to mark it with the mouse.

Once the programs start scrolling down to show the text out of sight and you DON'T move the mouse it will scroll down slowly

But if you go crazy and move around your mouse cursor as if there is no tomorrow the marking will actually become faster

Why is that?

I know it's not a bug, because i have seen this behaviour to a lesser extent on Win machines aswell

Just curious as i'm wondering about this behaviour for years

[tonyw]

The reason is that if you bring the cursor down to the edge of the window, the program (certainly Notepad and Multiview and some others) use the Intuition clock to add rows of text to the clip. That clock is 10/second, so without any jiggling, you'll get ten rows/sec added. However, you can jiggle the cursor and get to a new un-highlighted row more quickly than by waiting for the next clock tick.

IIRC Windows does it by speeding up the rate of row-adding once you get to the bottom and beyond.

[Raziel]

The reason is that if you bring the cursor down to the edge of the window, the program (certainly Notepad and Multiview and some others) use the Intuition clock to add rows of text to the clip. That clock is 10/second, so without any jiggling, you'll get ten rows/sec added. However, you can jiggle the cursor and get to a new un-highlighted row more quickly than by waiting for the next clock tick.

IIRC Windows does it by speeding up the rate of row-adding once you get to the bottom and beyond.

I can finally sleep well again, thanks for the explanation

[gazelle]

The real reason is that a program can only react to events it gets. If you stop moving your mouse the program will not get any new events and would just keep waiting for the next one. To avoid this situation most programs also listen to INTUITICKS to keep going if necessary. The more events the faster the processing. If you keep moving your mouse like crazy there will be a lot of mousemove events which speeds up the selecting.

[Raziel]

Sooo, a "fix" would be to add a "Mark All" command to Multiview (or rather the corresponding text plugin?)

^^^^^^^^^
Feature Request

[chris]

Sooo, a "fix" would be to add a "Mark All" command to Multiview (or rather the corresponding text plugin?)

^^^^^^^^^
Feature Request

Or you could do a select/adjust style for text highlighting, like NetSurf uses.

ie. highlight with left mouse button as usual, and extend the highlighted area out (after scrolling) with the middle mouse button.

It's a RISC OS feature, but it works well and saves holding the mouse button down and waiting for an excrutiatingly slow scroll.