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I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and hi
by zelphirkalt 1y ago
I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes it pretty terrible. If additionally it would actually be useful in other ways to highlight and copy text on a site, then I get really annoyed by web non-sense like that. Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger.
This is not what hypertext has been created for. Stop making the web into a cesspit of bad accessibility.
- cyanydeez 1y agoThis would be a good use case fpr a small LLMxOCR to dynically highlight text.
- JayShower 1y agoI also have the habit and am not sure why. I just find myself double-clicking and highlighting whatever I'm reading. Someone noticed me doing it once and asked if I had a tic.
- marklubi 1y agoSimilar story for me. With my work, I get pulled in a lot of different directions at seemingly random times. This helps me quickly resume what I was doing.
- johnisgood 1y agoWhen I do it, this is exactly the reason why.
- halJordan 1y agoYou're not sure why you do something that verifiable makes focusing easier?
- mastercheif 1y agoI was worried I was the only one who did this. Glad to know I'm not alone out there.
- will_pseudonym 1y ago> I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. "There are dozens of us!"
- muxator 1y agoHi, fellow compulsive selectors! Thanks, I am no longer feeling alone!
- jonnat 1y agoThe hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing screens...
- viridian 1y agoI still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain thus far.
- Hard_Space 1y agoGlad also to feel justified at last!
- edbaskerville 1y agoMe too! Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard to break.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoMe three, there are many dozens of us! Compulsive selecting while reading, and hitting CTRL+S every couple seconds while editing documents, are the two "weird" habits I couldn't kick for decades now. Most of the time, I'm not even conscious I'm doing those things; I only notice when the text isn't selectable or the program pops up a modal in response to CTRL+S.
- johnisgood 1y agoI am with you on CTRL+s whenever I am using ANY software that saves upon pressing CTRL+s.
- brulard 1y agoSame here. And so many pages have stupid popups whenever you select something and more often then not you are just triggering weird actions that you don't really want.
- YeahThisIsMe 1y agoThat's why NoScript is an absolute necessity to me, even if it takes some time and experience to figure out which script URLs to whitelist to get a usable site.
- AlfredBarnes 1y agoOne of my ticks is repeatedly highlighting text over and over. I blame years of drone splitting. It also helps me focus on reading.
- lupire 1y agoWhat is drone splitting?
- aiiane 1y agoSomeone played EVE Online.
- umpalumpaaa 1y agoOr StarCraft… https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11tb1gp/how_come_pros_can_split_the_starting_drone_at_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11tb1gp/how_come...
- AbraKdabra 1y agoYou mean StarCraft.
- lordgilman 1y agoIn StarCraft you can give individual orders to your initial group of workers (drones) instead of giving them one big group order. It takes only a few seconds for your drones to move to the resources so you only have a few seconds to click and give multiple orders.
- topspin 1y agoSame habit. Can't remember when it started. I've caused myself problems doing this. Some PDF datasheets somehow prevent selection. Deeply annoying. You just know there is some fool calling that shot, thinking their protecting something precious.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoWith PDF you can have vector text that isn't detected as text. Some desktop publishing tools layout each glyph individually and the reader may not reconstruct the underlying sentence geometry to base selections on. You can also have scanned bitmap pages with no underlying OCR text layer for the reader to make selections from. PDF text detection and selection is a black art.
- Shorel 1y agoI started when using Windows 95. Selecting stuff allowed me to see if the computer had frozen and required a reboot. Those where the wild times ;/
- whatamidoingyo 1y agoSame here. I was doing it while reading your comment. I imagine there are dozens of other people doing it as well, haha.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThe modern web has been dissuading me of this habit. I get unreasonably angry when I select some text, only for an engagement pop up to appear, demanding that my selected text be shared with the world via social media. No, how I interact with the page is a private affair.
- tevli 1y agosubstack is the biggest culprit in this.
- hatthew 1y agorelevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1271/ https://xkcd.com/1271/
- zelphirkalt 1y agoOh my ... Why didn't I know that one earlier? This stuff is also what I do! Like estimating until where to select, to select half of the text, given that the last line ends at 1/3 of the line width ...
- kilroy123 1y agoI literally selected your comment as I read it. I do the same.
- bashevis 1y agoSame. I made a chrome extension years ago to enable this on desktop Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/selectable/jcidlhgdoojamkbpmhbpgldmajnobefd https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/selectable/jcidlhgd... There isn't a great workaround for mobile apps though.
- a2dam 1y agoSame here, I even have a fun mini game in my head where I try to make the selection box beginning line directly up with the end on the row below.
- dutzi 1y agoI love you
- fletchowns 1y agoI think my text highlighting habit started in the late 90s when the prominent N64 website (what was the name of it??) would have text intentionally "hidden" on the page in the same color as the background, so you had to highlight to see it.
- 1bpp 1y agoYou might mean N64.com, which later evolved into IGN64/IGN
- fletchowns 1y agoYeah I think that was it!
- narag 1y agoWell, yet another compulsive selector here, but: Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger. This is the worst. It permeates all kind of GUIs. Windows has this mini preview windows that pop up when you're hovering over the apps in the taskbar. Also if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are minimized except the one previewed. Microsoft has systematically terminated every single way of disabling this idiocy. Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD. I'm no proud of it, but I think I'd use physical violence if I could confront the culprit.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago> Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD. At one time in my life, I might have called you out for bad-taste hyperbole… but no, this kind of thing is genuinely traumatising. And that's ridiculous: what has the world come to, that desktop operating systems are giving people PTSD‽
- lomase 1y agoAlso if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are minimized except the one previewed. This does not happen on my windows machines, must be something configurable, I would hate it.
- visarga 1y ago> Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger. Twitter did that, every pixel was reacting to clicks. Selecting text was hard
- system7rocks 1y agoI am not alone in this universe???
- bdangubic 1y agoI selected and highlighted your comment dozen times while I was reading it :)
- empyrrhicist 1y agoI'm doing it right now.
- cryptonector 1y agoIf you do it constantly then it's OCD :) but you don't need OCD for clicking and highlighting text to be a legitimate thing that readers do. So 100% this kind of website you're talking about is utter crap. -50 is not enough.
- aartaka 1y agoTotally agreed. I’m often compulsively highlighting things too, and I often get caught in clickable areas. We need proper text content, not this.
- crazygringo 1y agoWhat are example web pages that prevent this for body text? I feel like I've never come across it before, expect TFA which is making a point... I also can't recall ever coming across a clickable action trigger on every word. Just links that might have some popup action. And I use opt+click to select things within regular links. I'm genuinely curious because it seems like lots of people are agreeing, and this is not a problem I've ever encountered before. Are there common sites known for this that I just haven't visited?
- __icarus__ 1y agosubstack and some modern ebook apps such as kindle and Wechat books. When you select a popup appears for highlight, leave a comment, or share.
- crazygringo 1y agoThanks. I just tried on substack and oof. That's incredibly annoying. I get it now.
- aaaronic 1y agoDitto!
- tstrimple 1y agoFor me I think it's an ADHD adaption. When I was in classrooms, I really struggled to listen to what was being said unless I was doing something else at the same time. I often doodled in my notebook. It looked like I wasn't paying attention, but that was the only way I could pay attention. Now when reading comments or articles I'm constantly highlighting and unhighlighting sections as I read. I think it's just another coping mechanism to have some more stimulus to help focus on things.
- protocolture 1y agoI selected and highlighted your comment before reading it.
- jcul 1y agoSame here, funny to find there are others. I got a laugh from how this page ironically disables select, actually makes it difficult for me to read it!
- fainpul 1y agoIt's most satisfying when the text selection has a nice color, that fits the theme of the site, instead of the boring default blue. Web devs, please make use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::selection https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::selection
- gwern 1y agoOne of the most surprising Gwern.net bug reports was from a compulsive highlighter who noted that the skip-ink implementation (which uses the old text-shadow trick, because frustratingly, the recently standardized skip-ink CSS still manages to fail at its only job and it looks awful) looked bad because of how browsers handle shadows and highlighting. We had known about that (and it can't be fixed because browsers don't let you control the highlighting), but we had never imagined it'd be a problem because you'd only see it briefly when once in a while copy-pasting some text for a quote - right? I mean, why else would anyone be highlighting text? You'd only highlight small bits of text you had already read, so if it looked bad in places, that was fine, surely. (Narrator: "It was not fine.") Just another instance of Hyrum's law, I guess... We decided to WONTFIX that because we can't easily fix that without making it uglier for users who don't abuse highlighting and are reading normally, which is almost everyone else.