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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

Fellow serial selector here. Is there a formal name for what we do?

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150528-00/?p=...

Not a name, but many people do this to help them focus and read. Having a smallish block of selected text enables easier visual tracking (so less likely to skip/repeat lines). It is more common in the ADHD and dyslexia communities, in my experience.

Color coding works too.

How do you mean? Syntax-based or something else?

At paragraph breaks, one or more paragraphs, comparable chunk size, pastel colors so there’s some difference/contrast but not too much.

Can you send a screenshot? I am the creator of a tool [1] that uses color to aid visual focus, so I’m very curious to see what the approach you’re describing looks like.

1: http:www.beelinereader.com/individual

Something like the colored blocks in this spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/pwp/

I've seen your tool before. For high speed reading (> 500 wpm), block-level colors are more useful than sentence-level colors.

Would love to connect to hear more about your experience and perspective. If you have a minute, please drop a line: contact at companydomain. Thanks for the pointer!

I do the same, and I think it originated back when I had a mouse with no scroll wheel. Dragging a text selection up and down to the top and bottom edges of the viewport let you scroll up and down by arbitrary distances. I'd call this "selection scrolling?"

The thing I do nowadays rarely involves scrolling, though, so it's probably just "digital fidgeting."

Transitioned from dev to management. Amount of micro-distractions is so high that it's a convenient micro-bookmarking tool. It's also an aid against scroll jank from loading pages / delayed banners / what not. In some cases I also just click page to ensure focus is in there, because of some pages having niché scrolling methods that require click-to-focus before pressing any scrolling hotkeys (up/down, space, page up/down, etc) will work.

OMG I have found my people.

:hug:

Me too! I thought it was just me...

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