This is not another "I hate the ribbon" discussion (I hope).
Instead, here's a list of some "text editing" improvements I'd like to see:
- Allow partial selection of variable names. I can't drag select just a piece of a variable name. It's all or nothing. I understand that it's nice to be able to grab the entire name, but that's what double-clicking is for. This becomes more significant when you consider the next item.
- Once a math region (or portion of a region) has been selected, typing new text should delete the selection and replace it with the new text being entered. e.g.: To change a numeric constant, I have to double-click, press delete (or backspace), then type in the new number. It would be much nicer to not have to remember this unique behavior. Every other program I've tried automatically deletes selected text when a selection exists and new text is entered. The text regions DO have this desireable behavior. It's disconcerting every time I have to stop and think about what's happening when I'm trying to edit a math region.
- Find and replace needs to be non-atomic. I seem to be able to SEARCH for fragments of text in variable names, but I don not seem to be able to REPLACE fragments of text in variable names. It seems that if I search for "Fx", I can find it in "Fx.wind.load", but if I try to replace "Fx" with "Fy", I still find "Fx.wind.load" but end up with "Fy" (and no more wind load). (Fortunately, Undo gets me out of this hole!) It's as though "Whole words only" is always secretly turned on for replace. Search and replace would be much more useful if I could us it to change the spelling of pieces of variable names. e.g.: After working with Fx.wind.load and Fy.wind.load, I'd like to be able to do a quick search and replace to end up with Fx.applied and Fy.applied.
- Pressing backspace while editing the subscript of a variable should not kick me out of subscript mode.
