Dear lazyweb (Re: Shift selection using interactive spec)

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

Mathias Dahl wrote:
> Is anyone looking into Thomas' ideas at all? 
>   

Thank you.

I have a research question I'd like to suggest to anyone who
might be interested and the question and who, unlike me,
is not feeling too lazy at the moment to do some research
about the question.

Very simply:

How does Open Office implement shift select?

What variables control shift select in Open Office?  What APIs?
"How do they do that?"

The point of the question is that Open Office's behavior
is probably a pretty good example of "what user's expect".

I don't know what the outcome of researching this question
will be.   Maybe the OO implementation is an ad hoc mess
and will just add to the confusion.   Or, maybe, they have a
very clean model of it that will reward the question asked
with new clarity.

(Because the universe tends towards the cruel and ironic,
probably it will turn out that OO sets a flag for many
commands, defining a category of "motion commands",
and does it all with the moral equivalent of hairy pre- and
post- command magic -- exactly what Emacs should *not*
do -- but there is some chance that OO happens to do it
some clean and illuminating way.)

-t