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As a linguist I often have to switch back and forth between Mac and Windows environments. I find that for the sake of rapidly editing text for several hours a day, having the advantage to chose between 3 types of selection on the Mac makes my workflow faster.

However, when working on the PC environment (Windows 7), I find that I spend (or rather waste) a lot of time selecting "by hand" (meaning dragging from the first letter to the last) whole paragraphs (or whole sentences inside paragraphs).

What I am trying to do is go from this:

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To this:

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Note: The triple-click isn't a "select all" action, it only selects a paragraph defined by a dot or a line break.

Note: This would ideally be a system setting to allow for many programs within the Windows environment to function this way. The programs I use are somewhat limited and there are no ways to just use another one.

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2 Answers 2

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How the mouse reacts to certain click-combinations is controlled by the applications.

I.E.:

  • In Word you can click Ctrl+Click to select a sentence.
  • In Wordpad (built into Windows) and Notepad++ triple-click = select line.

So I'd suggest getting/using a more feature-rich text editor than Notepad.exe, since it's intended to be as basic a text editor as possible.

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  • Thanks for the info. I added a note to explain that basically, I am working with text editors that are requested by client and that the change of behavior of the triple click should be system-wide if possible. Nov 17, 2016 at 19:37
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    Yeah, as I said, it's up to the application to handle all but the most basic mouse actions. See this related SU answer. Nov 17, 2016 at 19:49
  • You should be able to implement this with AutoHotkey. autohotkey.com/board/topic/28635-triple-click
    – uSlackr
    Nov 17, 2016 at 21:35
  • @uSlackr Free to add a AHK-based answer, only ensure that you provide real details, as I could see using AHK to perform this action could get really sticky on the actual action part (selecting a line/sentence). Nov 17, 2016 at 21:57
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I had this problem. My solution was to use EditPad Lite, a free text editor for Windows.

enter image description here

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