Its a very unusual question, but I'm in need of this feature. In Windows Phone, how can I maintain visible the caret position cursor of a given TextBox, without showing the softkeyboard (virtual keyboard)? In Android this is very possible, but I haven't found anything in WP. Thanks in advance.
This is not possible. Caret is only visible and associated with focus being on that control. The same applies to Soft keyboard.
Related
when selecting large swaths of text from webpage I have to keep left mouse button pressed while searching for the selection's end. It would be nice if the browser would "remember" selection's start point and let me search for the ending point, e.g. by dragging the scrollbar downwards, without pressing the mouse button.
Does a plugin or other implementation of this sort already exist?
The answer to this is OS/Windowing system specific. In most/all systems there is a normal way to have the system perform what you are desiring. An add-on for Firefox is not required.
Windows:
If you click (button down and up, not button down and hold) at the start, or the end of the selection you desire then move the mouse to the other end of the desired selection (scrolling the page as needed to get the the other end) you can then hold the shift key down and click again. This will select the entire region from the first point you clicked to the second point you clicked while holding the shift key. You can adjust the selection by continuing to hold the shift key while doing any of: clicking on a different location, performing a click-drag movement, or using the keyboard cursor keys. This adjustment does not change the point at which you first clicked, just the second, end point.
It is also possible to use the control key to select individual items. This is possible in combination with clicks, double-clicks, and triple-clicks. An example would be to move your mouse around in this paragraph holding the ctrl key down while double-clicking on various words. Your selection will include just the words on which you double-clicked. In some instances, when using only a single ctrl-click to select from a discrete list (e.g. a Windows Explorer folder display), a second ctrl-click on the same item will de-select it. You can also combine the use of ctrl-click and shift-click to create more complex selections with the beginning of the shift-click selection starting at the most recent ctrl-click location.
The Mouse and Pointers page in the Windows Dev Center provides some fairly technical descriptions as guidelines for Windows developers.
Linux (using GNOME):
The interactions are similar to What was described for Windows, but a bit different. Section 10.1.2. Selecting Objects of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.3 provides a good description.
Apple/OSX:
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines describes how selections can be made on Apple machines.
I have a long line that I want to select a section in the middle. In Visual Studio, it would scroll all the way to the end of the line, passing where I want the selection to end, when I move pass the text area and move all the way back when I try to move back a little. Is there a way to slow down the Visual Studio scrolling adjustment?
If you are talking about selecting text using the mouse you can get fine grained control by combining the the mouse and keyboard. This should work in any application that allows text selection, not just Visual Studio.
First click the location where you want to begin selecting text.
Next scroll to the location where you want to end selecting text and hold down Shift on the keyboard while clicking with the mouse. The block of text between the first click and the shift+click will be selected without having to worry about the selection jumping around due to scrolling.
As for actually slowing down the scrolling; I know of no way to do that. Hopefully my tip should give you an alternate way to do what you actually want.
I have a very simple Windows Phone app with one TextBox. When I type some text, then press Space 2 times, WP7 automatically add a dot.
I dont want the dot. How to handle this ?
Adding a dot when pressing "space" two times is a feature from the WP7 keyboard. The user can disable it from the phone settings.
Since it's a global setting, you can't change it. The best you can do it to forbid the user to type dots altogether (when pressing space two times AND when pressing the dot key). If you want to do that, just subscribe to the TextChanged event of your TextBox, and remove the dots.
The short version is that I've turned the brightness way down on my monitor and now I'm having problems finding the mouse cursor in eclipse (the text cursor). When it's a pointer cursor it's fine, but when it goes to the text cursor I can barely see it. Half the time I'm guessing where it is.
To be quite honest this is for all of Windows, but it's really a problem for me in eclipse where I spend a lot of time.
Update: I have looked at the windows settings, specifically the "Text Select" under "Pointers", but I'm not sure what to replace it with. I don't know anything about the .cur file it requires.
I am not sitting at a Windows box right now, so I can't try, but you can set the mouse cursor in the system settings / mouse settings. You can set specific cursors, like the text cursor. Windows ships (at least: shipped) with cursor themes that are much better visible. The same problem can occur when you need the "precision select" cursor - a small negative cross, invisible on grey background. But there are replacements with strong contours that are easily visible. So you don't have to change the whole pointer theme, if you don't want to, but can change just this one or two problematic.
I did this when using Windows XP, I hope it still is valid for 7.
I like the windows phone 7 designer but the copy and paste of textbox is irritating. It just keep paste the textbox at the very top. It would be much more productive that it paste below the previous textbox.
So would it be possible to change this behavior by hooking this with some IDE API ?
If you are using the visual designer, rather than using copy and paste, you can drag a new control from the toolbox and drop it precisely where on the form you want it.
The IDE isn't arbitrarily dropping the control at the top of the screen, it places it at 0,0. You could argue that this is as good a place to put it as any. In a true copy and paste, the physical location should be exactly the same but that would be confusing.
I would expect it to be quite uncommon to place one textbox directly under another without a textblock or somethign else in between. In any case it would be necessary to change the position from where it was copied. At least with the current behaviour you'll always know where the new control is.
Not sure about hooking into the IDE, but you might find it easier to just use Blend for the UI aspects. For example, if you have a vertical stackpanel, you can copy and paste and have each control appear below each other in the correct position.