When I’m making changes to a document, I want to be able to select individual characters (for deletion or substitution).
Dragging across them with the cursor is nigh-on impossible (and in OpenOffice usually results in moving a large chunk of text to an entirely unexpected location).
Today’s invention is the ability to click in a word processed document thus:
This would be easy to remember and stays, just about, within the brain’s limits on instantaneous counting.
Microsoft workd had this long time ago but I am not sure if this function applies to other software
I use double-click to select a word fairly often, so I would be annoyed if I had to triple-click to do it instead. What I use to select a single character, if dragging precisely is too annoying, is click on the character, putting the insertion point next to it, then hold Shift, and then press the left or right arrow key to the other side of the character. This selects the character. You can hold Shift while using all normal keyboard movement shorcuts to select text, such as holding Ctrl on Win or Option on Mac to skip a word at a time when moving horizontally.
Yep, good point. The trouble is, I’m one of those benighted folk who don’t do control keys, shift keys, arrow keys -all that geeky “I know a really cool shortcut” stuff …don’t like keyboards at all much. Clicking; I can handle.