Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Double-click-drag to select entire words

Here’s a quick tip on selecting text with the mouse that I’m blogging as much to help myself remember as to inform you, the reader:

You can double-click-drag – that is, double-click, and continue holding the mouse button on the 2nd click – to select multiple entire words from a block of text.  This obviates the need to position the mouse cursor exactly over the small space between words when selecting entire words or sentences, both when beginning and ending the selection.

Bonus tip: You can triple-click to select an entire line or paragraph of text.  (This one I do remember and use frequently – and get annoyed by those few applications that don’t support it.)

These tips work in most applications on both Windows and Mac.