Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

5-5. Cursor Design and a Strategy for Making Selections

The traditional intent of both delimited- and incremental-string searches is to find and to select a target string in the text. Patterns that people use in searches tend to be short because long patterns are tedious to type and, in most systems, must be accurate to the character if they are to match the target. Therefore, string searches typically are not used to select even moderately large targets—say, those greater than 10 or 15 characters in length—much less truly large blocks of text. One application of string searches is to help you find the location of a desired selection, after which you use another technique, such as using a GID to drag from one end of the selection to the other, ...