How text selection should work

Recently, Pierre Igot kicked off a thing by linking to an old article by John Gruber about how text selection works in OS X in his own article, Shrinking and expanding selections in Mac OS X, about how this is still handled fairly inconsistently. Sample quote:

Sadly, three years later, things are still a total mess in Mac OS X, even when one keeps the focus exclusively on Apple’s own software applications. If anything, it has become even more complex and confusing.

This leads to Gruber linking to him and to other articles, because Gruber loves to link to articles about Gruber. (Fair enough!) Gruber’s own take seems to be this:

The text selection behavior Pierre Igot is complaining about in the aforelinked piece is exactly the behavior recommended by the HIG: […] In other words, if you create a selection using the mouse and then extend the selection using the keyboard, it doesn’t matter whether you created the selection by (a) dragging left-to-right, (b) dragging right-to-left, or © double-clicking. In all three cases, the selection is unanchored in terms of extending it using the keyboard. I agree with this.

He also links to another piece (mostly) defending the OS X way of doing text selection.

Caught up? OK. Here is what all of these pieces are missing:

(from Engadget)

Text selection in Mac OS X is clearly inferior to text selection in iPhone OS X. The desktop OS need to add in little grabby handles like the mobile OS has. It would be so much clearer if after you highlighted some text and when you pressed shift+← the left selection handle started glowing or being highlighted or whatever. Then when you press shift+← again, it would make total sense for the selection to expand on the left side. It would make the current behavior make visual sense. It would also allow you to grow or shrink a selection with your mouse if you wanted. It would also make the tricky box selects that you can sometimes do by holding down option make more sense. Everything would be better and children would laugh and sing together. Leaving the grabby handles in iPhone OS X only would be a real shame.

I filed this as a request for enhancement in Apple’s bug track some time back. It’s #6703135 for those with the ability to see those kinds of things.