Saturday, November 17, 2007

Leopard text rendering engine

Wow.

A hint on macosxhints talked about double command-clicking on text URLs doesn't work anymore because command dragging is for discontiguous text selections. Well guess what else Apple changed in Leopard: they added column selections!

In Terminal, TextEdit, and probably any other app that uses core-text rendering, you can now:
  • command-drag over other text to create a discontiguous selection
  • option-drag a region to create a rectangular text selection (yay!)
  • command-option-drag to select discontiguous rectangular text selections (wow!)
Rectangular selections work even if the font isn't monospaced -- and it seems to go by what you see visually, not by character position, so you now can rip a column out of a space-delimited table without a bunch of pre-processing with regular expressions. Nice job, Apple!

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