re: editing fields…
Hello,
Chris, I have, at times, experienced similar field editing troubles.
Frank, I'm glad you chimed in on this. For some time I have been looking for an earlier reply, from you, on some thread, referencing the effort Martin put in to change the behavior of modifying fields, and that he was unlikely to change it after getting things to behave the way he wanted. I wanted to find that thread to get context for my experience of editing the value of fields that frustrates me. Since I did not find it, I had no relevant C3D-intent context to frame a comment.
I use a Wacom tablet and pen to "mouse". While I can recreate the troubles I have with editing the value of a field with an actual mouse (or touch pad on my MBP), using the tablet it is hard to NOT have the issues. Now that I have Frank's comment as some context, it would seem this is because C3D interprets some particular movement of the cursor, after a field-content selection has been made, to be (if I understand Frank correctly) the indication that I have completed the editing process.
I sometimes use tab and shift tab to progress/regress through fields, though it is not the way I do it if I need to change only a single digit's value rather than all of the digits of the value. The up/down field arrows are typically not the level of granularity I want when editing a single digit of a numerical field.
Tabbing to a field then using the cursor key to go to the end of the value to enter a mathematical expression (e.g. *10 or -.15) works, but as Chris referenced, tabbing isn't always the most direct way to do something.
As an added complication for me, over the years and for whatever reason, I have developed the practice of selecting editable text/numbers from the right back to the left rather than from the left to the right.
Selecting any editable text or number in C3D (e.g. field contents or material name), from right to left will result in the un-selection, of that selection, almost instantly regardless of the "mouse" device.
Frank, I had NOT thought to try, so I have yet to explore whether or not multiple monitors affects the behavior. But if multiple monitors comes into play, why only with C3D? In my experience, this direction-of-selection behavior seems exclusive to C3D, as I have NOT experienced it using any other application, certainly not in the Finder.
Selecting the same text from left to right typically behaves "better" in preserving the selection, but spurious movement after selection results in deselection.
Back to the beginning of this message and my reference to an ancient comment by Frank on text selection in C3D… I have not mentioned this directly* before now and have accepted that I will, at times, get frustrated editing such things. To cut down on my frustration, if I have a lot of field editing to do, I turn on my Magic Mouse and edit the text/numbers using it, but that opens a whole other batch of how-did-I-change that issues.
* I did ask Chris, perhaps in this thread, how he liked his new M Mac running 8.0b and how editing fields was going, as he had referenced that one thing he was looking forward to was better field editing. He replied that things were working fine.
So, I just wanted to confirm that Chris is not the only one who has troubles when it comes to editing fields. I do wonder why it seemed to be working for him the way he expected, but then stopped.
Cheers,
gsb