Quite possibly the most infuriating thing I've experienced in any software I've ever used. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided that dragging your mouse over text isn't good enough; to make it "easier" they need to select wordish boundaries for you. So if I want to select "I dislike Microsoft" out of the text "I dislike Microsoftish business practices," you must first select "I dislike Microsoftish ", paste it, then trim the "ish " by hand. Wow. That makes my work so much more productive! Seeing as I've only been using a mouse for about 10 years, I need help deciding what I need to select. Thanks Microsoft!.

The rules, as near as I can figure them out:

  • If the selection is within a word, select individual letters.
  • If the selection travels over a wordish boundary, select the whole word plus the space after it
  • If it's in wordish selection mode, if the mouse travels over a word, select the entire word, the period, semicolon, colon, or comma after it (if it exists), and the next space.
  • If a word is double-clicked, randomly choose whether to include trailing spaces, punctuation, or whole sentences.
  • Angle brackets don't count as anything; so if you attempt to copy the html out of <b>this</b>, good luck to you.
  • Selecting a space is also random; it might select the space, it might select each word surrounding the space. You can never tell.

Yes, Microsoft Windows mouse or touchpad selection will automatically select word boundaries while selecting from left to right. However, after it does so, you can reverse back from right to left to fine tune the selection to the exact end character you want.

And yes, it also changes the start character you selected to be the start of the word when in word boundaries mode. If you really want to select from the middle of the word to the middle of the next (further) word, you have to select the start character from left to right to next word, immediately reverse, go forward again, and reverse back to the stop character you want. Easy, eh? ;-}

The above also apply if you start from right to left, in that case everything would be in reverse.

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