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I’ve been trying out numerous text editors in an effort to find one that will meet my needs… so far EmEditor is the closest, but I’ve come across one minor quirk that behaves differently than I would expect, and differently than others I’ve tried.
Say I’m editing a file with 10 lines. I want to copy line 3 and insert it either before or directly after the existing line 3.
Normally I would have the cursor at at the beginning of line 3. I would hold the SHIFT key and press CURSOR DOWN once. This highlights the entire line 3 including the line break, and positions the cursor at the beginning of line 4. Then I need to insert this line either between line 2 and 3, or 3 and 4 (either will work for me).
What I have always done in ordinary Notepad is press CTRL-C, then CURSOR UP once. and then CTRL-V to insert the line. However in EmEditor this results in an unexpected behavior: after pressing CURSOR UP, instead of the cursor being positioned at the beginning of line 3, it is instead positioned at the beginning of line 2. So it has jumped from line 4 to line 2. What I would have expected is that pressing CURSOR UP would result in the cursor moving from the beginning of line 4 to the beginning of line 3, and also remove the selection from line 3. I can only get EmEditor to do that if I hold SHIFT while pressing CURSOR UP.
Since the cursor is visually drawn at the beginning of line 4, I would not expect it to jump to line 2. This is actually very similar behavior to how Wordpad and Word works (treats the selection as a “block”), EXCEPT that both Wordpad and Word do not draw the cursor while you are selecting text, so there’s less expectation as to where it will move to.
Notepad, Notepad2, UltraEdit and PSPad all work as I would expect, so is this a specific design decision on EmEditor’s part to emulate Word?
If so… then man, that’s about the third editor that’s been 99\% perfect except for ONE crucial thing!
Sunfox wrote:
I’ve been trying out numerous text editors in an effort to find one that will meet my needs… so far EmEditor is the closest, but I’ve come across one minor quirk that behaves differently than I would expect, and differently than others I’ve tried.Say I’m editing a file with 10 lines. I want to copy line 3 and insert it either before or directly after the existing line 3.
Normally I would have the cursor at at the beginning of line 3. I would hold the SHIFT key and press CURSOR DOWN once. This highlights the entire line 3 including the line break, and positions the cursor at the beginning of line 4. Then I need to insert this line either between line 2 and 3, or 3 and 4 (either will work for me).
What I have always done in ordinary Notepad is press CTRL-C, then CURSOR UP once. and then CTRL-V to insert the line. However in EmEditor this results in an unexpected behavior: after pressing CURSOR UP, instead of the cursor being positioned at the beginning of line 3, it is instead positioned at the beginning of line 2. So it has jumped from line 4 to line 2. What I would have expected is that pressing CURSOR UP would result in the cursor moving from the beginning of line 4 to the beginning of line 3, and also remove the selection from line 3. I can only get EmEditor to do that if I hold SHIFT while pressing CURSOR UP.
Since the cursor is visually drawn at the beginning of line 4, I would not expect it to jump to line 2. This is actually very similar behavior to how Wordpad and Word works (treats the selection as a “block”), EXCEPT that both Wordpad and Word do not draw the cursor while you are selecting text, so there’s less expectation as to where it will move to.
Notepad, Notepad2, UltraEdit and PSPad all work as I would expect, so is this a specific design decision on EmEditor’s part to emulate Word?
If so… then man, that’s about the third editor that’s been 99\% perfect except for ONE crucial thing!
EmEditor’s behavior is similar to Visual Studio (C++), and the cursor still blinks. So, Visual Studio’s behavior is a minor behavior? If some people prefer other behaviors, I might need to make it an option. Anyone, other opinions on this topic?
Thanks for the response. I haven’t actually used Visual Studio before, so I guess if some other software follows this method it makes sense that you might have used it. However, it does seem to be more of a Word Processor or IDE behavior than a Text Editor behavior (at least based on all other text editors I’ve tried so far!)
Could this perhaps be made a global option, or even something set per Configuration?
Selection Mode: Text / IDE
Sunfox wrote:
Thanks for the response. I haven’t actually used Visual Studio before, so I guess if some other software follows this method it makes sense that you might have used it. However, it does seem to be more of a Word Processor or IDE behavior than a Text Editor behavior (at least based on all other text editors I’ve tried so far!)Could this perhaps be made a global option, or even something set per Configuration?
Selection Mode: Text / IDE
I might add that option in the future. (I will add that to our wish list.) Thanks!
I noticed another unexpected behaviour when being used to notepad or alike.
If you want to select a whole single line, either by clicking three times on it or clicking on the left hand side of the line, the cursor is positioned on the next line. Notepad puts the cursor at the end of the selected line.
So please change this behaviour too if you’ll add a “notepad compatibility mode”.
Thanks
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