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VisualEditor: Add a (small) left margin to the CE so that users can select whole lines at once
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Description

From a user suggestion:

Normally word processors and text editors have a left margin, allowing
whole lines to be selected. There would normally be a small gap of a few
pixels between the left column of text and the left margin, allowing a
"margin of error" for regular text selection. To the left of this gap,
any clicks select entire lines, and any drags up or down select many
lines at once.
I don't know if there is a need for the complete left margin
functionality in VisualEditor, but certainly, the editing area shouldn't
stop at the exact edge of the letters. Perhaps the padding on the VE
container needs to be increased with a compensating decrease in the
margin - or maybe that's totally wrong, but you get the idea.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz43333

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 1:01 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz43333.

For the first part, some IDEs do this (e.g. Sublime), but LO, Google Docs & gedit don't. The downside is it reduces the target zone for placing the cursor at the start of a line.

For the second part, we already have left padding into which you can click to position the cursor at the start of the line.

After discussion with the team, we feel that this doesn't make sense because this is mostly a feature that makes sense in line-based editors (generally, for code), and VE is not one of these.