I do use this feature -- I often select random blocks of text while reading. This feature means I often (5-10% of the time) have to click discard and then reply again to get my desired behavior.
In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.
Yes! In fact, the Office 2007 team ran into the same problem with "selection readers"[1]. They purposefully designed the minibar (small useful toolbar that appears on text selection) to not interfere with us that like to select while reading/navigating.
It's a shame so many designers out there (NYTimes, Google, and many, many others) fail this basic usability test.
Oh my that NYT feature drove me nuts. Not only does it mess with us habitual selectors but it is basically hidden from the users who need it most, those not savy enough to select-right-click-search-on-google a word they don't understand.
Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.
HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.
New recruit reporting for duty. I've never seen anyone else read webpages the same way I do - by selecting to scroll - so it's a surprise to finally find my kin. I guess it was more likely to happen on a place like HN?
Scrolling without selecting is just disorienting when I'm reading.
Scrolling. Selected text or word is just a marker when scrolling fast. It is much easier to follow visually fast moving selected part of the text than to keep track about sentence that I'm currently reading.
When using keyboard it's not that important, since one quickly learn how much PgDn scrolls, but when using mouse it is good to have a selection marker to quickly continue to read from there after scrolling.
I'm waiting for a bug in incognito to be fixed before I start promotion but I built a chrome extension that specifically solves this problem if you'd like to try it out.
I'm kind of happy to have just learned I'm not the only person in the world who habitually selects like this. I've done this for as long as I can remember, and the NYT thing drove me nuts as well.
Oddly enough I guess I always habitually deselect as well, so I've never noticed this gmail feature. Pretty useful.
Now if it browsers supported Sublime Text-style multiple selections for quoting several different bits of a long email, that'd be perfect.
On a sidenote it's kind of fascinating how polarised people are about this feature.
People are polarized because some find it very useful and some very annoying. Seems like a perfect example of what would be the best candidate for configuration option.
I do this to save my spot on a page when I need to scroll up or down, but on Windows you can do one better: scroll anywhere by dragging the scroll bar at the edge of the window, then move the cursor away from the bar and your view will snap back to where you were before you started dragging.
It's the single Windows feature I miss the most on other platforms.
Thanks. That's the first time I've ever heard of a use-case that validates that functionality.
I still remember the rage I felt when I switched from the Amiga in 1996 to the PC and found that Windows did that; screwing up a large part of the usability of scrollbars (for me) by adding a (to me) completely incomprehensible requirement for ultra-precise mouse movement or else you get BAM! back to where you started.
Note: not trying to claim that you are in any way "wrong", of course, I'm just pointing out the opposite perspective since I found yours interesting.
I used AdBlock to stop the NYT script that implements it from loading.
A large chunk of the reason I dislike Chrome is because of its weird text selection logic compared to Firefox - boundaries around paragraph starts and ends feel unnatural.
As another habitual text selector in this impromptu support group, I'll vouch for the assertion that Chrome's text selection behavior is really, really strange. Especially bizarre is when it wraps the highlight around the entire width of the page when selecting in a column of text.
Ah. Finally someone here who share my dislike for Chrome for the same reason. It does not snap selections at end of lines and paragraphs and makes too hard to read for people like us. Whenever I used to explain this as my reason behind preferring Firefox to Chrome, I've got curious looks.
Same here. For a couple months tabs where I habitually selected text (repeatedly) would crash in Chromium (on Linux). It almost cured me of this habit but it doesn't seem like this happens anymore.
Indeed it does. An other commenter noted that he did it in a way similar to doodling, just habitual and keeping occupied while reading. That's pretty much my case.
I often select a paragraph I am reading in case I get sidetracked or have to tend to a child nearby. It bugs the hell out of me when something got in the way of me selecting a paragraph!
So happy to see that others have this habit of selecting and highlighting bits of text as they read. I've been ridiculed for it, but I'm not the only one!
I'm amazed and excited we're all in such good company. Thought I was the only one who selected text all the time. But then, I but most of us view source often, and hover and look at where links point to before clicking, both things the general populace doesn't do.
I'm a habitual selector, but I also have the habit of clicking away from my selection before I perform any other action. Thus never had a problem with this feature.
I agree that select-causes-action in the NYT site is bad design, I'm not sure that select-then-take-action-affects-selected is bad design. In the later, it is the normal, expected way to take actions on a subset of the text. Sure, they could add a "reply - selected" button or dropdown option, but that would be a bit kludgey, and people would complain about the complicated/bloated UI.
Quora has a very similar annoying behavior. Every time you select some text, it asks if you want to "Embed Quote". I select text just to get some focus.
The greatest gmail feature you're not using is probably "Undo Send", if you're not already using it. I have it set to the longest possible timeout of 30 secs, and would like an even higher value.
Thanks! It's actually pretty amazing that in this day and age you interact quite closely to a lot of pretty influential people that some years ago, the equivalent would have been completely un-reachable.
Often, I select bits of an email, to copy and paste elsewhere to check things. Then I hit reply, and wonder why only the currently selected text is there.
mail.app on OS X also does this ( can be turned off i think ) and its always a similar annoyance to me ( select something to copy paste and the reply only has that)
At the very least, when you select text it should allow you to "Reply to Selection" as an option in the reply button (perhaps as default). I leave it to the UI experts to determine what's default and wording/icon changes. This meta-mode shouldn't reuse the reply keybinding either, and use a new one.
This would be far more discoverable and only minor changes to documentation over the current approach.
This feature is also present in Apple Mail, which is fortunate because ever since Apple Mail caught up to Gmail's last remaining interface enhancement (having an "archive" button), the greatest Gmail feature I use is IMAP access.
Wow, great, a condescending title! Fact is, I am using this. It used to be in the settings, I think, which is how I found out about it. And as others have stated, it's in a lot of mail clients. Apple Mail supports this, as does the iOS mail app, too.
"I haven't heard of this feature" != "no one knows about this feature".
Huge annoyance. It got much worse with an update I received about a months ago. The quoted text is by default collapsed so when you want to reply quickly to someone, you won't even notice you're top-posting.
I tried to contact support or fill some feedback form to no avail. I eventually gave up.
Anyway, this is how web apps ride (no a single day passes without me ranting about the current trend, which I find alarming).
What's wrong with top-posting? (I've using email since the 90s, and at some point I realized I only disliked top-posting because of its cultural significance--I now prefer it for its functional advantages.)
There's no big difference if the quoted part is small enough and you're replying in one go (although I'd argue that even there it breaks the historic flow of the conversation).
It is a big of a hassle if you want to reply to parts of the original post, Usenet-style (y'know, before "Usenet" meant "less traceable file sharing"). There having the answer atop of each single paragraph you're responding to is seriously weird, it's like playing Jeopardy with email.
Never mind that breaking up quoted text into parts is pretty buggy with gmail, due to the absence of quote chars (replaced by those colored bars).
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
=======
As ever, there are exceptions, with one-on-one, serial email being the most prevalent. But if there's more than one recipient, top-posting is godawfully confusing.
Seriously... even if they feel they need to do top-posting by default to satisfy the drooling masses trained on outlook, maybe they could use this "selected text" feature as an indication the user is more careful about their reply quoting, and position the cursor below the quotation in that case...
1. I'm one of those serial overliners which will randomly select text and paragraphs while reading, so half the time I end up with a completely useless piece of quoted text.
2. I craft mail responses by quoting all the original mail, interspersing responses and cutting the stuff I don't care for afterwards, very rarely do I only need to quote a single contiguous block of text without anything else, unless the single contiguous block of text is "all of the original mail" anyway.
claws-mail as well. It's a fundamental feature if you're trying to do real work with email. Now if only gmail allowed us to respect the netiquette and had an option/labs for bottom-post by default.
That's neat. I used to cut down emails by means of ctrl-K in my browser, which, being mapped to emacs keys, means "delete this line". However, in their brand new email compose thing, Google has seen fit to override this, making that key combination point to "make a hyperlink" or some such BS, causing me much, much frustration. Yes, I know, you can still utilize the old way of doing things... but for how long until they decide that it's simply got to go and it's time for you to upgrade.
Why aren't we able to rebind these keys at will? Why is it hardcoded?
We've been able to rebind keys in videogames for a long time. Why can't we rebind ctrl+o to be cut, ctrl+t to be undo, and ctrl+k to be "delete this line"?
Why can't we have ctrl+v be one clipboard and ctrl+f be a different one?
Web developers are in the process of re-inventing everything that the desktop solved in the 90s. Meanwhile, the desktop is in the process of destroying everything it solved in the 90s. Ah, progress.
I'm guessing that a lot of HNers spend a lot of time in their Gmail account, and that this functionality (which was news to me) was perceived as a significant time saver and judged to be worth sharing with the rest of the community.
I guess i just knew about it already and didnt find it ground breaking enough to be on the front page.. but hey, your reason makes sense and i dont have to agree with everything. =P
That's a feature in Mail.app, too. Does that mean I should write a blog post about it? Will it get to the front page of Hacker News? Will it get to the top? What if I say it's the best feature you're not using on Mail.app? I'd be wrong, but people would still go to my site, right?
I honestly think HN should be doing more about linkbait like this.
I usually read through emails highlighting (selecting) the important parts with the mouse. So when I hit "R", Gmail quotes only my last selection. Discard, unselect, hit R again.
I just realized that this feature also exists in Outlook, which explains why many of my replies have strange quotes. I often highlight a user id or URL to copy for further investigation, then hit reply only to be confused by the condensed quote in the reply window. Now it makes sense :)
I can't be sure, but I suspect that what you are calling top-posting is the opposite. Top-posting refers to the sloppy practice of just pasting your reply ("posting") on "top" of the entire quoted email, rather than quoting selectively and replying point-by-point, as you're supposed to do.
On USENET, especially without a threaded client, top-posting was a sin because it often removed valuable context - or forced the reader to scroll down to see the context then back up to see the reply. It also made for poor arguments in long threads where a poster would address multiple points at once rather than inline, point-by-point.
Similarly, when using non-threaded email clients the same problem exists. The bottom of the post becomes a mishmash of quotes and arrows (ah, "> > > > > > > > > > >", how we miss you) and almost impossible to figure out what the original poster was trying to say.
With threading, and especially Gmail's aggregate view of threads, top posting is far less of an issue. If everyone is using Gmail (e.g. Apps set up within a company), there's very little reason to reply inline for shorter messages, and more reason (phone consumption) to top-post. For longer discussions, though, it still helps to address points individually inline rather than attempt to pull them out on top.
Even within an organisation entirely using Gmail, there are still people who are sticklers for bottom-posting and seethe when they see top-posting. I used to be one of those people on USENET, but for the reasons above, I've changed my stance considerably.
The thing that's made it easiest for me to embrace the top-posting worldview is to remove all redundant fluff from e-mails, including the quote when not forwarding.
That said, it looks like the world is converging around the idea that down maps to past (inboxes, browser history, Twitter, Facebook timeline).
I wonder if anyone has made a top-posting-style shell? It'd be like using less as a shell...
My work email is usually HTML which is clumsy to reformat with the precision I had formatting simple text using Emacs+Gnus on Usenet. Normally I'd rather have the transcript of successive emails anyway.
If by "care about" you mean "annoyed by it and treat it as a sign that I am corresponding with a techno-illiterate who is, in addition, at least somewhat slovenly in regard to his correspondence," then, yes.
Here is the email feature I want. If I paste a URL that looks like a post/article into a new message, I want the slug automagically split, title cased and copied into the subject line.
I love this feature, and have been using it for a while.
Off topic, but a similar feature exists in Pinboard (https://pinboard.in). You can select some text on the page before clicking bookmark, and that gets set as the description of the page in the bookmark. It's a pretty handy feature if the page title is not enough to describe what the page is about.
I'd like Gmail to do better as an email client confirming to standards. If someone sends me an email with the Resent-{From,To,...} headers then I want them shown to me. How can I forward an email as a message/rfc822 MIME content-type rather than a poor rough text approximation in the main body?
I've been using this feature for ages, but it got much worse about six months ago when the last message in a thread became automatically "focused". Now when I scroll up in a thread and select some text, the message I'm selecting text from doesn't automatically get focus. I have to click one extra time to get focus on the message I'm selecting. Even after half a year, I still forget the extra click in about 20 emails per day, making the reply go to the last message in the thread, with the entire thing quoted. To recover, I have to discard my new message, scroll back to the thing I wanted to reply to, and repeat the process. I filed a bug report in the first week, but no response and the bug remains.
I've accidentally used this feature a number of times, and it drives me nuts.
The greatest feature about Gmail that not enough use is 2-factor auth (even though it is not limited to Gmail- other web-based mail services provide it); it is a pain in the arse, but after you get hacked once or twice, you'll be happy you did it. Popular Saas apps are prime targets for being hacked. It may mean they are safer, but they are also riskier to use. If you're not using 2-factor auth, you should probably not use Gmail, unless a hacker taking control of your account wouldn't bother you or your contacts.
I thought most of the email clients did that already and I just checked a few which in fact don't! I'm pretty sure thunderbird does this if you want the same feature on an external application.
That's all nice and dandy, but check this out. For a few months now I've been noticing that emails from my inbox were being moved after a few days into spam, without any kind of warning. This happens once every two weeks, more or less.
We're not talking about false positives, these are emails that stay in my inbox for days before being moved to the spam folder. Which basically means I need to check my spam folder every day. Trust forever lost.
I'm pretty sure this feature is not on by default. You must turn it on in labs and then it is enabled. It's odd if that's the case because everyone posting here knows of it as if it were just part of the experience.
But I'm looking at the on/off radio button in labs in another tab right now.
Great! Except lately I've come to despise ui elements that can only be discovered by accident. An easily usable and effective feature that I only find via a blog post is a feature that could use some visual feedback.
This is an unfair comment. Think about all the features gmail has that aren't buttons in the UI. Would you really like 1) Buttons for all of these 2) some pop-up or otherwise annoying message coming up for each of these features when your trying to write/read an email?
I personally don't like that feature, for I often select a portion of the email (eg a name or an address to google it) and then when I hit reply I notice only the highlighted text remains!
And I was about to say "Of course I'm not using this since I don't use gmail" but I use claws, which does this. Personally I would chuck any mouse-using client that doesn't do this.
I often "hit" this feature by mistake because I "mark" the text I am reading. Personally I find it annoying and if I could I would disable it... any help apreciated.
I tried using this feature in Apple Mail for a few weeks before turning it off because it was super annoying (I found it annoying for the same reasons mibbitier did).
jgrahamc - Offtopic, but usethesource.com is down.[1][2] Since it's still being linked from your blog, I assume this is unintentional and possibly went unnoticed.
the issue i have with this is that it deletes all previous messages from the email thread. So if someone wants to read back through previous messages or forward the email onto someone who does - no es posible.
While we are talking about greatest features and GMail... it would be awfully nice if they would finally implement some sort of sub-string search, given it's almost 2013 and they are synonymous with searching and finding things on the internet.
It is incredibly frustrating that in order to be able to find an email I received years ago I have to figure out exactly how someone might have written a certain term in that mail. And I cannot see any excuse for not offering that feature; limit me to a few substring searches a day if resources are an issue and I don't expect fully-indexed lightning-fast results, a simple "grep", so to speak, would be just fine...but please let me search my mails properly!
Even though sub-string search is a slightly offtopic for this post I'll go on with this.
As a native Finn it's quite hard to use Gmail search for anything in our native language.
Just an example. If I want to search for, as an example, invoices (which many companies send directly to your email) I simply cannot do it.
The reason is this:
"Tässä laskunne" - "Here is your invoice"
"Saitte laskun" - "You've received an invoice"
"Puhelinlasku" - "Mobile bill" (the monthly invoice)
The word for invoice in Finnish is "lasku". And there are immense amount of ways to morph the word. And that is with every word. So in order to search for those kinds of mails we usually just search in the basic form. In GMail it's impossible so it's a pure guessing game.
I think this shows nicely that when developing something and thinking "This feature is not really needed" you might accidentally ruin the whole main feature for use cases you're not familiar with.
I use Opera for this. It is set to periodically fetch my mails from Gmail and I do not use its builtin mailer to send/receive/read mails (I use the web interface for that), but if I need a substring search then I open the Opera mail search panel and it allows me to dig through my past mail with substring search.
Edit: maybe it is doing prefix search only (I dont' know I search prefixes usually), so it's no true substring search, but prefix search is very useful in itself.
Yeah but undoing sending something to someone as opposed to editing a text file feels like pure magic, not to mention the fact that the undo link is right up there in front of you after you have clicked Send.
I do it all the time...just out of habit really but it's one I can never see myself dropping...even in nano on an SSH client :p it makes reading easier for me, I installed flux recently too in order to make the white strain less on my eyes...maybe there's a correlation there?
In related news nytimes.com used to have a similar feature where the definition of words would pop up when you selected them. It basically caused me to stop reading their site.