Sometimes when selecting with the mouse, I select everything other than what I intended to select due to the mouse moving slightly above or below the line being selected. For example, in your address bar place the mouse pointer after the hostname "superuser.com" to select "/questions/806549/mouse-selection-based-on-initial-mouse-movement-direction" in the URL. Now drag to the extreme right to select the entire path and query string. Now move the mouse up a few pixels. AGGHH now "http://superuser.com" is selected, but the parts you tried to select are not selected!
Is there any way to configure KDE, or any other environment or component (X?) [1] to understand that when the user is dragging to the right the intention is to select the text after the point of click, and when the user is dragging to the left the intention is to select the text before the point of click? [2]
When it was only me having this issue, I though that I'm just unskilled with the mouse (VIM and Vimperator user) so I'll live with it. But I've seen this happen to other people as well. You can't fix the mother in law, and you can't fix the secretary even though she's a heavy solitaire player and apparently skilled with the rodent.
Non-answer: Silly Dotan, just pull down when scrolling to the right and pull up when scrolling to the left.
Rebuttal: That might solve the issue for me, but what about grandpa and the secretary?
- I use Kubuntu Linux, as does the secretary, but failing an answer for KDE I'll accept an answer for any other desktop environment on any OS.
- Note of course when selecting RTL text (Hebrew, Arabic, Persian) that the directions will be reversed.