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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes it pretty terrible. If additionally it would actually be useful in other ways to highlight and copy text on a site, then I get really annoyed by web non-sense like that. Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger.

This is not what hypertext has been created for. Stop making the web into a cesspit of bad accessibility.

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> I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading.

"There are dozens of us!"

Hi, fellow compulsive selectors! Thanks, I am no longer feeling alone!

The hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing screens...

I still do it, for emphasis. Never had anyone complain thus far.

Glad also to feel justified at last!

Me too!

Developed this habit as a kid on a Mac IIcx in 1992. Hard to break.

Me three, there are many dozens of us!

Compulsive selecting while reading, and hitting CTRL+S every couple seconds while editing documents, are the two "weird" habits I couldn't kick for decades now. Most of the time, I'm not even conscious I'm doing those things; I only notice when the text isn't selectable or the program pops up a modal in response to CTRL+S.

I am with you on CTRL+s whenever I am using ANY software that saves upon pressing CTRL+s.

I vaguely remember hearing an anecdote about how UX researchers love people that read like that (or at least just use their cursor to keep their position while reading/navigating): Camera-free eye tracking telemetry :)

Some of us were even actively selecting and highlighting that text as we were reading it! ;)

Hell yeah, I did that!

Ya'll gaslighting me? I tried to do that, and found it didn't work, which was just wonderfully ironic. I ended up verifying there's a `user-select: none;` in the actual `select-text.html` styling that is indeed disabling text selection. Was it added later for shits and/or giggles?

Myself, and I think others, were referring to highlighting the text of your comment. You're indeed correct that the original posted article doesn't allow selection.

Ahh, that would make sense.

Plus knocking on the desk when I finish a sentence, too.

This made me chuckle.

Join the club, we have compulsive mouse habits.

(am a member of this select club)

me too!

Seriously! Same! Relieved to know I'm not alone in having this quirk.

Such a relief! But it drives my wife completely crazy.

I think there are way more than dozens of us.

The modern web has been dissuading me of this habit. I get unreasonably angry when I select some text, only for an engagement pop up to appear, demanding that my selected text be shared with the world via social media. No, how I interact with the page is a private affair.

substack is the biggest culprit in this.

I also have the habit and am not sure why. I just find myself double-clicking and highlighting whatever I'm reading. Someone noticed me doing it once and asked if I had a tic.

Similar story for me. With my work, I get pulled in a lot of different directions at seemingly random times. This helps me quickly resume what I was doing.

When I do it, this is exactly the reason why.

You're not sure why you do something that verifiable makes focusing easier?

Well, yet another compulsive selector here, but:

Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger.

This is the worst. It permeates all kind of GUIs. Windows has this mini preview windows that pop up when you're hovering over the apps in the taskbar. Also if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are minimized except the one previewed.

Microsoft has systematically terminated every single way of disabling this idiocy.

Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD. I'm no proud of it, but I think I'd use physical violence if I could confront the culprit.

> Using one Windows inside another (vbox) at work is causing me PTSD.

At one time in my life, I might have called you out for bad-taste hyperbole… but no, this kind of thing is genuinely traumatising. And that's ridiculous: what has the world come to, that desktop operating systems are giving people PTSD‽

Also if you accidentally hover over them, all the windows are minimized except the one previewed.

This does not happen on my windows machines, must be something configurable, I would hate it.

> Similarly I get annoyed, if every pixel is some clickable action trigger.

Twitter did that, every pixel was reacting to clicks. Selecting text was hard

I was worried I was the only one who did this. Glad to know I'm not alone out there.

Same here, I even have a fun mini game in my head where I try to make the selection box beginning line directly up with the end on the row below.

I love you

I think my text highlighting habit started in the late 90s when the prominent N64 website (what was the name of it??) would have text intentionally "hidden" on the page in the same color as the background, so you had to highlight to see it.

You might mean N64.com, which later evolved into IGN64/IGN

Yeah I think that was it!

I literally selected your comment as I read it. I do the same.

Same. I made a chrome extension years ago to enable this on desktop Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/selectable/jcidlhgd...

There isn't a great workaround for mobile apps though.

Same habit. Can't remember when it started. I've caused myself problems doing this.

Some PDF datasheets somehow prevent selection. Deeply annoying. You just know there is some fool calling that shot, thinking their protecting something precious.

With PDF you can have vector text that isn't detected as text. Some desktop publishing tools layout each glyph individually and the reader may not reconstruct the underlying sentence geometry to base selections on. You can also have scanned bitmap pages with no underlying OCR text layer for the reader to make selections from. PDF text detection and selection is a black art.

I started when using Windows 95.

Selecting stuff allowed me to see if the computer had frozen and required a reboot.

Those where the wild times ;/

What are example web pages that prevent this for body text? I feel like I've never come across it before, expect TFA which is making a point...

I also can't recall ever coming across a clickable action trigger on every word. Just links that might have some popup action. And I use opt+click to select things within regular links.

I'm genuinely curious because it seems like lots of people are agreeing, and this is not a problem I've ever encountered before. Are there common sites known for this that I just haven't visited?

substack and some modern ebook apps such as kindle and Wechat books. When you select a popup appears for highlight, leave a comment, or share.

Thanks. I just tried on substack and oof. That's incredibly annoying. I get it now.

Same here. And so many pages have stupid popups whenever you select something and more often then not you are just triggering weird actions that you don't really want.

That's why NoScript is an absolute necessity to me, even if it takes some time and experience to figure out which script URLs to whitelist to get a usable site.

For me I think it's an ADHD adaption. When I was in classrooms, I really struggled to listen to what was being said unless I was doing something else at the same time. I often doodled in my notebook. It looked like I wasn't paying attention, but that was the only way I could pay attention. Now when reading comments or articles I'm constantly highlighting and unhighlighting sections as I read. I think it's just another coping mechanism to have some more stimulus to help focus on things.

It's most satisfying when the text selection has a nice color, that fits the theme of the site, instead of the boring default blue.

Web devs, please make use of

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::selection

Same here, funny to find there are others.

I got a laugh from how this page ironically disables select, actually makes it difficult for me to read it!

Same here. I was doing it while reading your comment. I imagine there are dozens of other people doing it as well, haha.

I'm doing it right now.

relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1271/

Oh my ... Why didn't I know that one earlier? This stuff is also what I do! Like estimating until where to select, to select half of the text, given that the last line ends at 1/3 of the line width ...

One of the most surprising Gwern.net bug reports was from a compulsive highlighter who noted that the skip-ink implementation (which uses the old text-shadow trick, because frustratingly, the recently standardized skip-ink CSS still manages to fail at its only job and it looks awful) looked bad because of how browsers handle shadows and highlighting.

We had known about that (and it can't be fixed because browsers don't let you control the highlighting), but we had never imagined it'd be a problem because you'd only see it briefly when once in a while copy-pasting some text for a quote - right? I mean, why else would anyone be highlighting text? You'd only highlight small bits of text you had already read, so if it looked bad in places, that was fine, surely.

(Narrator: "It was not fine.")

Just another instance of Hyrum's law, I guess...

We decided to WONTFIX that because we can't easily fix that without making it uglier for users who don't abuse highlighting and are reading normally, which is almost everyone else.

Totally agreed. I’m often compulsively highlighting things too, and I often get caught in clickable areas. We need proper text content, not this.

I am not alone in this universe???

This would be a good use case fpr a small LLMxOCR to dynically highlight text.

I selected and highlighted your comment dozen times while I was reading it :)

I selected and highlighted your comment before reading it.

One of my ticks is repeatedly highlighting text over and over. I blame years of drone splitting.

It also helps me focus on reading.

What is drone splitting?

Someone played EVE Online.

Or StarCraft…

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11tb1gp/how_come...

You mean StarCraft.

In StarCraft you can give individual orders to your initial group of workers (drones) instead of giving them one big group order. It takes only a few seconds for your drones to move to the resources so you only have a few seconds to click and give multiple orders.

If you do it constantly then it's OCD :) but you don't need OCD for clicking and highlighting text to be a legitimate thing that readers do. So 100% this kind of website you're talking about is utter crap. -50 is not enough.

Ditto!

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