Hello all,

I hope I'm not wading into a discussion about UI without understanding the background here, but is there any good reason for the different behaviour of Okular depending on the selection modes? That is, in 'normal' (ie rectangle) selection mode, a menu of options appears immediately you release the left mouse button. In text selection mode, you need to make a right click or use the menu to do anything with your selection. Meanwhile in table selection mode you can't do anything other than divide up the table until you hit the escape key. This is all very inconsistent, not only with other GUIs, but even internally to Okular, and violates the principle that modes of operation should be kept to a minimum.

I would like to suggest that the operation be standardised around the current behaviour in text selection mode, as this is standard GUI behaviour. In addition to eliminating the current inconsistency, this would permit a wider range of context-dependent options to be made available via right-click. We could also (eventually) do more fancy things like allow compound selections, even of different kinds and get rid of the zoom tool entirely, by making 'zoom to selection' and 'zoom out' as right-click options, depending on whether or not there is an active selection. None of this seems very difficult to do at all - the code is all in ui/pageview.cpp and it would simply be a question of rearranging the functions that handle mouse button presses and releases.

FYI the reason why I am interested in this is that I am working on using Okular as the basis for a mark-up/tagging tool for qualitative research, as a part of which I need to extend the range of functions that can be applied to selections. See a brief discussion here: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/okular-devel/2015-November/021920.html and the code itself here: https://github.com/jschultz/okular-tagging

Cheers,
Jonathan


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