On 25/03/2025 10:00, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
On Tue, 2025-03-25 at 02:25 +0000, mick.crane wrote:
eg.
alpha
beta
charlie
delta
select only "alpha" and "charlie" text with mouse drag and copy.
I was able to do what you're asking by using the CTRL key.
[...]
If that doesn't work at all on any given webpage, it will likely have
something to do with how the webmaster coded the page.
It is broken in the following cases:
- Tables are used for element layout and you are trying to select text
in different cells. Likely it is some legacy website. In regular tables
with some data you may select rectangular blocks of cells.
- CSS rule "user-select: none". It is widely used in mobile-first web
applications for elements that should act as buttons. ...Or just to
suppress unwanted text selection when intention is to scroll the page
through touchscreen gestures. It is terrible approach from my point of view.
- A bug with selection crossing shadow DOM, e.g. a SVG icon that causes
reset of any selection.
However it is specific to Gecko (Firefox, Thunderbird) while
Chromium-based browsers do not support selection of additional fragments
using Ctrl. Even for Firefox the feature may be abandoned
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/753718
Stop supporting Selection objects with multiple Ranges
So multiple selection ranges (or multiple cursors) feature is specific
to particular applications (or toolkits). To select blocks of table
cells there are some extensions for Chrome.
For 2 fragments a workaround is to copy first one to CLIPBOARD and to
use PRIMARY selection for another one. Perhaps some clipboard manager
may collect multiple fragments into single "paste".
Nowadays SECONDARY X selection is not supported by applications. I have
not seen it in action, but the following description is close pasting of
multiple fragments:
https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~lindsec/secondary-selection.html
Charles Lindsey. The Secondary Selection
