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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. In my case, I hardly edit urls manually in the address bar. Usually I end up on a site either by clicking on links or copying and pasting a whole url from elsewhere. So, when I click on the address bar it's almost always to copy that url. Exception may be if you are front end dev testing different paths on the browser in which case editing in the address bar could be common.

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But the automatic single-click selection doesn't fill the X clipboard (meaning it isn't pasted by middle click), so when I want to copy it I have to triple click anyway. Since it looks like it's selected, I frequently forget to do so, which results in pasting something I didn't mean to.

Holy crap, I just realized this is why I've pasted the text instead of URL all these years!

Thats the only good thing about it... when the X clipboard has an error message in it that I want to search about, I dont need to worry about the search box being already full

You're referring to selection1, not the clipboard. There is (for me, on Arch) also a selection2, which I haven't investigated further.

Notably Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V operate on the clipboard, while selection and middle-click operate on (at least) selection1.

I single-click in address bar, which selects all (in Chrome), then I command-c shortcut to copy.

Which is my main use case for clicking in the location bar, copying the URL. So I appreciate that single-click selects all, so I can then copy with a keyboard shortcut.

I'm confused by your comment "when I want to copy it I have to triple-click anyway" -- I'm guessing you are on linux(?)... does triple-click or select alone automatically copy on Linux? (If select alone normally copies to clipboard, then I'd say it's a bug that it "looks selected" but hasn't copied to clipboard?)

This may be a thing where different behavior is appropriate for different OSes. Perhaps the FF devs who rejected the feature are also Linux users? I think FF wants to get market share beyond what can be achieved focusing on Linux users though.

When I click the address bar it's because I want to use the current tab to visit a new page, so select-all is perfect.

I think they should make this configurable though, I can see both sides of it.

Click -> select all

Ctrl+Click -> insert

Ctrl-T and start typing is much faster than mousing the cursor up to the URL bar

CTRL-L and then passing the new link goes to it in the current tab.

F6 and paste on Windows.

Or Ctrl-L.

But then I am left with a stale tab.

CTRL+L would be the shortcut, but often I browse without my hand on the keyboard, just the trackpad or mouse.

I forgot about that use case. I paste into and copy from the address bar all the time. But I still get myself sideways because I treat it like any other text box, and end up de-selecting the URL and having to try again!

You'd think after so long, I'd get used to the behavior and just single-click it. But apparently Pavlov would have me culled from his experiment :)

Time doesn't matter, because you probably interacts with many more normal text fields than browsers URL fields. And since they look the same, and act mostly the same, you won't learn to handle it correctly.

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