Selected text in Writer not highlighted when switching to another LO window

English
#1

Situation: working with an email from Outlook and I need to copy IDs and change their related info in a sheet and web app. A long time ago MS had the brililant idea to un-highlight text you selected in any Office app when switching to a different app, because keeping it highlighted might confuse people. (And losing track of what you had selected is obviously not confusing /s)

This is one of the many, many reasons I use Calc and Writer over Excel and Word. (Unfortunately there is no alternative for Outlook.)

However, today I discovered that LO has a similar “feature”: when highlighting text in Writer and switching to a different LO app, the highlighted text is not highlighted anymore (until you switch back). This only happens when switching to an LO app, so this often isn’t a problem, but when working in Writer and Calc it is. (Luckily the easy solution for now is to just use notepad.)

Tested on 2 computers on a very old version (7.something) of LO and 24.8.3.2

I’d consider this a bug and would love to have this fixed! (Or is there something like a “use consistent selection highlighting” option I can’t find?)

#2

This is exactly the common specification of GUI behaviour. It has existed at least since MacOS Classic and Windows inception in the mid-80s. I don’t know for the predecessors such as Xerox Parc and others.


The idea is to draw your attention on the window which has focus. When the window loses focus, it is required that any highlight be dimmed (or removed): title bar, frame, controls and contents of course.

Some applications prefer to dim rather than remove. For example, Firefox (under Linux) turns selection highlighting to light gray instead of fully saturated colour.

Having it “fixed” might be a huge endeavour because this behaviour may be done in various layers: the application of course if it receives a signal, the widget library, the window manager, the desktop manager, the session manager or even the OS.

#3

One of the reason this sort of makes sense for Office apps, is because they made it worse by also removing the distinction between foreground and background app by not having a colored toolbar anymore. (Something Windows 10, and some (non-MS) apps have also implemented.)


I very much prefer dimming the highlighted text, like the way it works in sooooo many apps, e.g., as you mentioned, Firefox: highlighted text in foreground window is white-on-blue, in background window it’s white on grey. It’s so much more clear and elegant than just removing the highlighting completely. A big advantage of using 2 screens is being able to quicly see specific data on your non-active screen/window, and highlighting helps so much!


Currently, Writer behaves badly: it doesn’t dim the hightlighted text when switching to a non-LO app (I still prefer it this way over no highlighting at all; and since I still use colored toolbars I rarely lose track of the active window), and it behaves diferently when switching to an LO-app.


Wouldn’t the fix simply be to have LO background window behave the same, regardless of what app one switches to? Wouldn’t making this behaviour consistent be the prefered behaviour anyway?

#4

This has been made worse by the presently “fashionable” tendency on dark themes. I find them not fit at all for office work. I have chosen a theme where window title bars are different between back- and foreground.

And you’re right, I didn’t notice LO doesn’t clear highlighted state, contrary to other applications.

I checked my theme settings (KDE Plasma, thus Qt widget library). There are 3 parameters:

  • selection background
  • selected text
  • disabled selected text

Apparently, LO does not take into account the last two in system theme. This is probably a bug or a missed point in implementation. For developers’ defence, it is extremely difficult to write “universal” code able to cope with all subsystems under all OSes. I bow to them about the success they have achieved (even with unavoidable existing bugs).

I suggest you file a bug report, feature request or enhancement on Bugzilla. If you do so, don’t forget to report the bug number in a comment. The syntax is tdf#<123> where <123> is the bug number (without angle brackets).

#5

I love a proper dark theme for webpages, but many apps seem to be unable to implement it well.


A different color title bar for foreground and background worked great for Win 7 (maybe 8 too? I never used it on my devices) and previous versions, I don’t know why they felt they needed to change it.
I used several tweaks to get it going properly in Win10 again, but there’s no option to do that in any of the terribly designed MS Office apps.


Anyway, thanks for the help, I’ll post a bug report tomorrow!

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