Text selection

I make extensive use of text selection for my own humble, unpublished, Google Chrome extension to read web pages fast (RSVP). I recently stumbled on a couple of not-well-known ways to make text selections easier. This is a quick post to share them.

If you double-click on a word and start dragging, it'll go on selecting whole words. This comes in handy when you have trouble trying to refine your selection at the word boundary. Likewise, if you triple-click a word and start dragging, it'll go on selecting whole paragraphs. Double-click selects individual words; triple-click selects paragraph. Nifty! I however noticed that some contents select whole line instead of a paragraph for triple-click; in any case, it seemed to go on selecting lines upon dragging. So that's consistent.

Another one, perhaps a little more known, is a way to continue your selection: single-, double-, or triple-click on the where you want to start your selection. You can release the button this time around. Without losing your current selection, scroll down until where you want to finish your selection, and then do a shift plus click. This will select the entire content since the start of the selection. Further, you can keep on resuming your selection this way as long as you don't lose your current selection. You don't have to take the pain to maintain the selection while scrolling the page any more!

Interestingly, word-selection works across browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer — and even on some Windows applications. Paragraph selection however appears to work only on Chrome and Firefox.