double click to select phrase

Anthony Ewell aewell at gbis.com
Fri Aug 25 06:00:09 CEST 2006


Don Christensen wrote:
> Olivier Fourdan wrote:
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>> Anthony Ewell wrote:
>> [...]
>>>     In the gnome terminals and the raw terminal (no GUI), I
>>> noticed that double clicking on a phrase will highlight the
>>> entire phrase.  Where in XFce, I only get a single word
>>> highlighted.  (I then paste with the middle mouse button.)
>>>
>>>     For instance, in gnome or raw terminal, double clinking on
>>> the "Try" of the phrase "Try_and_copy_me", highlights
>>> the entire phrase, where in XFce, I only get the "Try"
>>> highlighted.
>> Humm, the standard way is double click == select word, triple click ==
>> select line, quadruple click == select all text (not all apps allow that
>> though).
>>
>> Gnome and the console just work like that, and so does Xfce. Nothing
>> different here. Maybe a difference in the double click timeout
>> (settings->Mouse settings->Double click speed)
> 
> I would suspect that the issue has to do with the "word separator"
> characters (called "Select-by-word characters" in gnome-terminal).
> Double-click is usually defined to select a "word", but the definition
> of word varies and is sometimes configurable.
> 
> For me, gnome-terminal is set to use -A-Za-z0-9,./?%&#:_ as word
> characters, so anything with letters and underbars is considered a
> single word for selection purposes.  Contrast this with, for example,
> XEmacs, which considers _ as a word separator, so a double-click
> selection will stop at the underbars.
> 
> Check very carefully to see what terminal app is running in the
> various situation where it works and does not work, then see if
> you can configure the app(s) that don't work properly.
> 
> -Don
> 

I have to apologize to everyone for giving a misleading example.
Needless to say, underscores count as part of the word: dashes
and periods do not in xfterm4.  (My office computer multi-boots
dos, windows 2000, xp, and linux.  I have to make my professional
posting from Windows 2000.  Not wanting to reboot, I did not double
check my example.   :-[  )

First, this is the terminal I run in XFce (colors and
font sizes will vary so I can tell them apart with
a lot of them open):

     xfterm4 -fn 10x20 -fg darkred -bg white -bdc

A typical directory listing (ls) would look like this:

    CentOS-4.3-i386-bin1of4.iso  CentOS-4.3-i386-bin4of4.iso
    CentOS-4.3-i386-bin2of4.iso  CentOS-4.3-i386-LiveCD.iso
    yum_08-08-2006 CentOS-4.3-i386-bin3of4.iso  index.html

If I double click on the "yum" of "yum_08-08-2006", I get "yum_08".
(In the console and in gnomes stock terminal, I get the whole thing.)

If I triple click, I get the whole line.

If I quadruple click, I get nothing (back to start).


Any idea how to get xfterm4 to act like the console and/or gnome's
stock terminal?  How do I set my word separator?

Many thanks,
--Tony




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