Bug 244340 - Severe annoyance - editor hostile take-over of cursor selection causes typing to overwrite other code
Summary: Severe annoyance - editor hostile take-over of cursor selection causes typing...
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 237830
Alias: None
Product: Platform
Classification: Eclipse Project
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version: 3.4   Edit
Hardware: PC Windows XP
: P3 normal (vote)
Target Milestone: ---   Edit
Assignee: Platform-UI-Inbox CLA
QA Contact:
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Keywords: usability
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-08-15 16:35 EDT by Jonathan Neufeld CLA
Modified: 2008-09-02 02:17 EDT (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Jonathan Neufeld CLA 2008-08-15 16:35:17 EDT 
Steps to reproduce:

- I double-click an identifier in order to highlight it with the selection (for example, the name of a method declaration), (I think the method name also becomes highlighted with a gray background when the selection is gone)
- I paste something and then manually cursor over it to modify it slightly
- Then when I am trying to type something else somewhere else, every few seconds Eclipse takes the cursor away from me and highlights the text I previously double-clicked, and since this happens suddenly while I am typing I then inadvertently overwrite the selection with nonsense!!
- I use CTRL-Z to undo the accident and try again, but Eclipse steals the cursor and selection away from me again and again until I am fuming with anger and about to defenestrate my PC.

This seems to be related to the feature of double-clicking a source code identifier to automatically highlight all references / usages of that identifier in the current source file.
Comment 1 Remy Suen CLA 2008-08-15 22:48:40 EDT 
Does this happen in all types of editors? If not, what editor are you using (Java, C/C++, PHP, something else?)?

I see the 'OS' of this bug is set to 'All', which operating systems have you tested (and presumably reproduced) this problem on?
Comment 2 Jonathan Neufeld CLA 2008-08-15 22:54:36 EDT 
Apologies, this occurs using the Java EE Ganymede version of Eclipse and with Windows XP.
Comment 3 Remy Suen CLA 2008-08-16 03:51:07 EDT 
(In reply to comment #2)
> Apologies, this occurs using the Java EE Ganymede version of Eclipse and with
> Windows XP.

Thanks, Jonathan. And which editors are causing this problem? Does this happen on a new workspace? When did this start happening? Do you remember anything in particular that you did before and after this started happening?
Comment 4 Jonathan Neufeld CLA 2008-08-21 15:29:43 EDT 
I realize what causes this behaviour is enabling the "Link open editors with content in the Navigator" feature (icon button on Project Explorer of two golden arrows pointing opposite directions).  When I turned this off, this behaviour stops.

So therefore this is a usability issue rather than a bug, the behavior is consistent.
Comment 5 Jonathan Neufeld CLA 2008-08-21 15:32:22 EDT 
Further description:

The editor seems to "grab" the cursor and highlight the nearest method or field definition as the ancillary action to linking the outline / project explorer with editor content.
Comment 6 Boris Bokowski CLA 2008-09-02 00:28:13 EDT 
Passing to Platform Text (or would this be JDT Text?).
Comment 7 Dani Megert CLA 2008-09-02 02:17:21 EDT 
>Passing to Platform Text (or would this be JDT Text?).
None of them ;-)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 237830 ***