Only if the text is multiple paragraphs, otherwise it's too much of a hassle.
Poll: Do you select text while reading?
21–30 of 366 posts
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#22I don't, and it bugs the hell out of me when I'm sat reading with someone else who does. Nothing more distracting than them going nuts with the mouse while I'm trying to read.
I get why people do it, but sheesh, take your hands off the mouse for a minute, it won't kill you!
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#23I have on occasion, just when the text is one giant wall, I start having a hard time finding the next line without re-reading the line I just read. If I highlight the previous line I know not to read it.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#24No, but I do scroll the page up, so that the line I'm reading aligns with the top of the browser viewing area.
Some sites nowadays add a floating header to the top of the page that changes size as you scroll down which is super distracting when reading the way I do.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#25Yes.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#26When using a Chrome browser with adblock and flashblock and HTTPS, and JS disabled, sometimes text isn't where it was designed to be. Sometimes text covers images or runs into other text, and selecting is necessary to be able to read it.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#27For a long time the New York Times had a javascript thing that would pop up a dictionary reference for anything you double clicked on. As someone who compulsively doubleclicks to highlight and unhighlight, it bugged the hell out of me.
An IDE that I use at my job does this trying to pull up variable declarations for whatever you've selected (even if its giant blocks of data). I know that feeling.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#28I do it sometimes compulsively, but I think it started for a legitimate reason: clicking to make sure the text has focus. That way when I use up/down/PageUp/PageDown to scroll, the text actually scrolls. If there is a textbox that has focus, up or down jumps to that textbox instead which drives me bonkers.
Also, recent versions of Firefox have a bug where after you bookmark a page, if you've added a tag, the page loses focus and has to be clicked to re-focus (otherwise keyboard scrolling is broken). So far this has never bothered me quite enough to check if the bug was reported.
Edit: Since I cared enough to write about it here, I filed a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=815812
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#29When I read the title of this post I thought "WHOA, other people do that too?!" and clicked through to take the poll. Your poll is going to have a heavy selection bias towards people who select text while reading. People who don't select text while reading will probably ignore this poll and go read an article on erlang best practices or Paul Graham's favorite color.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#30For a long time the New York Times had a javascript thing that would pop up a dictionary reference for anything you double clicked on. As someone who compulsively doubleclicks to highlight and unhighlight, it bugged the hell out of me.
I used Glimmerblocker to nuke all Javascript from the Times because of this. What is it about newspaper websites that encourages what I can only assume are normally rational developers to misbehave so unbelievably badly?