Good [LWN.net]

Good

Posted Aug 5, 2010 9:50 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Good by ncm
Parent article: GUADEC: A message from the release team

Yes. Ctrl-A on pretty much every platform means Select All.

Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 19:21 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link] (4 responses)

This is trivially fixed by making ^A select all if you are already at the start of a line, so typing it twice works.

Good

Posted Aug 10, 2010 9:25 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

Why not do it the other way? Hit ^A once and you select all text, hit it twice and the cursor is moved to the beginning of the line. For extra fun, hit it again to remove the selection. More hits could bring other functionality too, or you can make it a cycle that starts over again.

Note to GNOME/GTK+ hackers: this post was supposed to be completely facetious, not a real suggestion. Please DO NOT DO THAT.

Good

Posted Aug 10, 2010 15:32 UTC (Tue) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

I suspect that you are just making a joke about my suggestion, but what you suggest would require remembering the cursor position while select-all is done, which most editors do not do (the cursor is one end of the selection). Also cyclic modes are a very bad idea, though they were popular with some older Unix editors, they are not user-friendly as the user has to watch to get them to stop, rather than just blindly hitting the key many times to get at the state they want (if it is the last state).

Good

Posted Aug 11, 2010 23:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Sounds like you want the immortal gnxt.

Good

Posted Aug 13, 2010 12:34 UTC (Fri) by richdawe (subscriber, #33805) [Link]

That would be fun for people using screen's default key bindings, where Ctrl+A starts screen's special key sequences.

I've just about managed to reprogram my fingers to type Ctrl+A A to go to the start of the line instead of just Ctrl+A (in screen sessions).