On 28-Feb-10 12:06:44, Chris G wrote:
I am *forever* getting text inserted at the wrong place because it's inserted at the mouse cursor rather than the text cursor. This happens particularly in web textareas but the problem is common to most/all GUI applications I think. (I just tried in OpenOffice and it's the same there).
Surely by default one would expect text to be inserted at the *text* cursor, not where you've moved the mouse cursor to which is often out of the way to avoid it obscuring what you're typing.
My editor (xvile) manages to do it right, it's a GUI application but text inserts where I'm typing.
Is there a setting somewhere to say "insert text at the text cursor"?
-- Chris Green
Question: Does "text insertion at mouse cursor" *always* happen, regardless of where the text cursor is? Or is it something that tends to "cut in" and does not happen 100% consistently?
If the latter, then it may well be due to spurious signals from the mouse/touchpad. For example, the touchpad on one of my laptops is hypersensitive. If I am using a text editor where the text cursor position can be moved by a mouse click (to where the mouse cursor happens to be), then suddenly I find my text going in where the mouse cursor is, as a result of the touchpad picking up the proximity of one of my hands and, in effect, sending a "touchpad tapped" signal (equivalent to left nmouse click). You could also get spurious signals from the mouse cable picking up EM interference (e.g. by passing close by a PSU).
On the other hand, if I am using a text editor which pays no attention to the mouse (e.g. vim) then I have no trouble.
However, in the text editor which is part of the email program I use, I get this problem from time to time. One solution is to deliberately move the mouse cursor out of the window, so that it cannot affect the text cursor.
Either way, what you can do about it depends on the program being used. In some, you may be able to turn off "mouse click moves text cursor", in others (probably most) not. In some (like vim) the mouse is irrelevant to text cursor positioning. I can't advise about this aspect of the matter.
Ted.
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