Before that it used to be holding the shift key for 5 seconds while I paused to think. That was especially infuriating if you didn't notice and ended up with 'sticky keys'.

Was this before the internet?

The computer has become infinite. Yikes.

Before all that, I spent a lot of time climbing trees and wanting to be an architect and writer (the latter of which I've been pursuing for a while now). My brother and I'd drag planks into trees and we'd build little things we called forts and make up our own currencies (using the tabs on soda cans, for example), we'd play with our family's chickens and cats, and we'd grouse about picking up fallen apples (because it was boring) and so on. Odd to think how little of any of that I'd get away with now -- now I'd suffer some odd looks from folks for climbing a tree that looked especially climbable. Really, the computer was just for Doom and Encarta and writing book reports. That's just rambling though and not all that interesting or indicative of any change other than growing up a bit.

Unfortunately, I was a child back then, so my memory of pre-Internet computer use is probably different than that of someone who was an adult the entire way through. Would be nice to see a bunch of people writing about it - not so much about how computers and the 'net changed things, but what they were like beforehand without concerning themselves too much with the difference between now and then.

However, I have clear memories of dragging boxes back and forth. They are so clear that I even remember inching the edge of the box closer and closer to the edge of an icon and seeing when it would select it. Also, I remember making the box thinner and thinner until it would either disappear, or you would get a single thick line when the dashed lines on either side were lined up with each other.

The only thing I don't remember is why or when I did it :)

I might highlight one section of text or paragraph and not another. Sometimes I highlight nothing. But, if it is a lengthy bit of text, I often find myself highlighting swaths of text for some reason.

This only applies to when I'm using a mouse.

I get extra annoyed when something prevents this. For example, a PDF viewer that loses a selection on a shift-click, rather than expanding it. I feel this actually increases the effort of reading, by taking away the easy tracking benefit.

In my mind it's much like when reading a book and idly toying with the corner, or shifting position in your hand.

I do see why it's annoying for someone trying to read the same text over my shoulder, though.

This made me think about how he demo'd our windows app, I had to also test double, tripple clicks, double click + drag etc. So I added a feature that on the 'About this product' page added the clicks and double clicks. When it reached over 100 I displayed an animated bunch of flowers.

Many months later I get a phone call from the sales guy, "Hey, monk.e.boy, I'm rehursing a demo and some flowers are showing." I was like, Jeeeesus, 100 double clicks on the most obscure page of our app?! WTF are you doing!

I drag selected text to between tabs to create a new tab with a Google search for that text. I do that a lot.

drag: thistext

And yes, I've reported this bug.

You can also highlight any URL (it doesn't need to be a link, just look like a URL) and tell Firefox to load it by either right-clicking or by dragging it to the tab bar. Try it out on any of the following:

  google.com
  www.google.com
  http://www.google.com

or as one comment of that extention says:

http://www.firefox.net.cn/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29894

Someone I know has an old website in flash that he had done that way so people steal the images. When I did a print screen and a 5 second edit in Photoshop he was a little shocked. He's get the site rebuilt in HTML now :)

If it's on the web, then it's gonna get stolen if someone actually wants it. Don't piss everyone else off in the meanwhile.

I come from a background of a lot of CLI, especially to remote systems over ssh, and the latency from when i type a character to when it shows up is a really good predictor for the system's IO if its being overloaded.

I guess this is also handy when doing remote desktop or in a VM -- but I never do that.

Drives my boss crazy.

Cheers, keb0b0

What I typically do is fire up Chrome developer tools, and DESTROY the offending node. I find this therapeutic. :)

The twitchy highlighting seems to follow three patterns: bored methodical clicking to help get through big dry paragraphs, fast erratic clicking when something is exciting, and sporadic clicking when I've stopped reading to think about something in the article.

When I worked in a high school I noticed almost the exact same behaviours as described, exhibited by students and younger staff. Pretty much all the computery kids were hyperactive click-highlighters and it was only the students who seemed positively uncomfortable around computers who didn't do it at all.

That's pretty much my behavior too.

Also, recent versions of Firefox have a bug where after you bookmark a page, if you've added a tag, the page loses focus and has to be clicked to re-focus (otherwise keyboard scrolling is broken). So far this has never bothered me quite enough to check if the bug was reported.

Edit: Since I cared enough to write about it here, I filed a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=815812

I had been using two finger scrolling since Lion. But most PC user that tries to scroll a page on my laptop, finds it very difficult.

Source: I'm CEO of Markerly and I look at this data everyday.

The comment complains about the behavior interacting poorly with text highlight reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838940

I love reading (and highlighting to read) these sorts of discussions.

[1] http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/01/one_free_interaction.h...

On the other hand I most often select text at the bottom of the page before hitting Space to advance the page. If you could place a line of highlight across the page before it starts spinning (or jumps) and fade it out gently after - that would definitely be of use.

Or you could think about splitting chubby paragraphs into predictably behaving chunks.

Very nice plugin, thank you.

[1] instead of stopping the scrolling when the first line is on the top or the last line is on the bottom, it scrolls to the middle before stopping.

I've never done that though, so I never felt the need to do so on a computer either.

The next most common reason is related to the first reason, and it's a shame that I have to do so. When you use text highlighting to track your reading (line by line), it's a sign that the site you're reading has poor typography. Usually:

Measure is too long - when lines of text are long, our eyes have a difficult time "tracking" back to the next line.

Leading is too small - Leading is the space between lines. The space between lines creates a negative void that our eyes follow back to the beginning of the next line. Not enough leading and the line is thin and hard to follow. Too much leading and your eyes get lost in a sea of space.

Usually I highlight from near the middle of one line to near the middle of the next line. If near the end of reading line N I highlight from the middle of line N+1 to the middle of line N+2, I can use the one highlight three times to help me track back: first I track back to the first line above the highlight (N+1), second I track back to the highlighted line (N+2), third I track back to the first line under the highlight (N+3).

Similarly highlighting multiple lines at a time it's easy to subconsciously remember which line of the selection to read next (first, second, third, ...) without having to visually track back, as long as the selection isn't very long (much like how it's harder to keep track of where you are in a longer paragraph).

And I understand that having text cover images in this situation can be described as "by design".

But it's still a case in which I select text.

I select text from kbd with SHIFT+arrows (up, down, left, right) or CTRL+SHIFT+arrows (left, right) and scroll the page with arrows. I want to do something nasty to the webdev each time I'm on the page which overrides those shortcuts. Especially when it's sth like redirect to other article on ARROW_RIGHT (sigh).

Fortunately I have "Disable JS" button right in the status bar...

TL;DR: do not mess with my keyboard or I will find you!

Now I'm a self-confessed habitual selector I feel compelled to say that in no way, shape or form do I select text like some kind of nervous tic. I rarely select text when reading HN comments for example, they're mostly short enough so I'm not going to have to scroll or have time to get pulled on to something else before finishing.

I voted for reading position because that's the one I use it for most.

I found that most people select because they are holding the mouse - they have to use it if they are holding it. Then sometimes you select to preserve your position while scrolling.

This also led me to believe that people digest information in chunks. Highlighted text serves as a "todo" - must finish reading the highlighted block of text before diverting focus to something else.

I frequently select text when I need to get up from my desk at home to deal with the kids (and not lose my place), but not to the extent that other here are describing, unless it's the random tick click thing.

I'm sure there's a psychologist in our midst that can explain this phenomenon. But, I'm still shocked that this post has generated this much attention.

It's really bad doing remote screensharing because the screen has to constantly redraw.

I've never seen the behavior before. It's quite odd. I never select text except for copy/cut operations.

I now wonder if all my years selecting text in old versions of Internet Explorer (to see how pages were built in HTML) was partly to blame? This technique was useful to see where clear gifs and other artifacts were often hiding.

And being able to permanently highlight stuff on the screen so that when I re-visit a page later and it still contains my highlights is something I miss.

http://jeffhuang.com/Final_CursorBehavior_CHI11.pdf

More precisely, the paper above ("No Clicks, No Problem") demonstrates that tracking cursor movements provides useful predictive value of reader interest. Selecting text is a special case of this.

This really bothers me when selecting words because sometimes I triple-click instead of double-click by accident, and I want to undo this but it requires waiting.

[Besides the simple "not what I'm used to" factor, any UI behavior that requires waiting seems pretty dubious to me...]

Deep down I really agree with that, but I become conflicted when I consider settings with severe limitations that have little else to turn to. For example: the timed hover to select on some Kinect games: touch screens that use longpress as a substitute for right-click; touchscreen keyboards with longpress as a shift-like behavior. It somehow seems regretfully acceptable when dealing with the limitations of a touch screen, single button, or no button environment.

One case where I think it is ok to require waiting are "Ejector seat button next to the radio" type situations where user action could have potentially disastrous consequences: I am glad I have to hold down my power button for some time to force a hardware restart.

2) When pages have low contrast, but I don't want to say View / Style / No Style (alt+v, y, n - in firefox), I'll select the whole page.

3) When pages have extra-wide text lines without sufficient spacing between lines (i.e., they do not conform to typographical rules for reading ... for example, Hacker News comments), I'll select individual lines in order to better follow the length of the line.

4) When interrupted in reading a lengthy article, so as not to lose my place, I'll double-click (middle wheel button is keyed to double-click) my reading position to highlight just that word.

Maybe this is one of those cases where nothing actually needs to be done. Highlighting is highlighting, it works great and fulfills different needs. There are lots of add-ons for focus, black-out, markers and other features, but none is widely used.

In adittion, we are moving towards touch interfaces. I haven't seen anyone frantically touching the screen to highlight text in those; as some have confessed here, I believe this behavior has a lot to do with the mechanical act of clicking, the sound and feedback that for some reason feels good and ends up becoming a compulsion.

I'm a compulsive highlighter for most of the reasons people have described. I don't hear any sound when I click though, because I use a touchpad with no mouse buttons or clicking (tap to click, tap-tap-drag to highlight, two finger tap to right click, two finger scrolling).

Since I started reading a lot on a touch screen phone I've been frustrated by the lack of easy highlighting, and I compulsively scroll to track my place instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

I implemented a JS feature where double click on a message body would send mark-as-read to the server via AJAX and remove the background color. When the feature entered testing, almost all the testers opposed it, as their behaviour with double clicking to select words or paragraphs they were reading was affected.

The feature was never deployed.

[Not just myspace and old geocities sites...I run into this sort of thing all too often, even on "real" (modern, corporate, well-funded, etc) websites. Sometimes it's just that the site designer seemed to be going for some sort of artistic/funky look, but in other cases the site looks fine in ie6 but becomes unreadable in FF or chrome... >< ]

I wonder if there's some kind of app to be made for these people, so that text moves around or changes color when their eyes track toward the text. (This would be horrible, to my taste, but you never know)

I really don't think that would help. For me the highlighting is a lot like tracing along text with your finger as you read on a printed page; it gives my eye a visual cue where I'm trying to track.

The issue is that I can read text faster than my eyes can track without wandering slightly and losing my position in the text, so simply tracking where my eyes are looking wouldn't do anything to mitigate that. It'd just end up highlighting where my tracking gets off anyway.

Nowadays I often still click the middle mouse button to enter a scroll mode where there's a cursor with arrows on the screen. Moving it scrolls. Unfortunately this feature was removed in Visual Studio 2010, but an extension brings it back.

I think I do it more with black on white. I find it difficult to focus reading from a large bright screen.

I do find I end up not bothering to read a lot of articles I'd like to online, end up either bookmarking and ignoring, or just skimming over. Think it's because reading long articles in a particular layout is a chore. A layout browser extension might help, I should give it a try.

I pause to think a lot when I read, so this is just sort of fidgeting while my mind thinks about something, I suppose.

I haven't started promoting it yet because of a bug in incognito mode but it's available at:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magicscroll-web-re...

I use highlight to mark the current position that i 'm reading, then mouse-scroll up/down to read some text i missed.

Ideally, i would like to keep the last 2-3 text selections that I made highlighted.

I also hate Nytimes and PLoS for hijacking my selections

This is a lot easier to do when using a tiling window manager -- but I hardly ever use the entire screen for the browser.

Still, even with just half the screen -- the browser pane is roughly equivalent to an A4 page -- way too wide for a single column of text -- so on poorly designed pages I frequently end up resizing the window to get a usable line width.

I also do it to find the mouse cursor. The text cursor is thin and not always easy to find amongst a large wall of text, so I'll click and start dragging and look to where the page is highlighted in order to find it.

I don't think I would use a browser plugin; selecting with the mouse is completely satisfying for whatever reason I do it.

I think it's a way for me to feel connected with the text, too. reading a book, I either trace with my finger or a piece of paper I slide down the page (not word-for-word, but by sentences and paragraphs).

For instance I have a friend who frantically selects and reselects small portions of the text the whole time. I on the other hand just highlight a line and hold shift then down arrow at the end of each line I know exactly which line is next to be read.

In terms of add-ons, I'd really like something that combines the function of a speed reader like spreeder [1] with the "articlization" of Pocket [2].

1: http://www.spreeder.com/app.php?intro=1 2: http://getpocket.com

Good to know that there are others like me out there. I wonder if there are any practical implications for this?

Other than allowing people to select text on your webpage, I don't see any immediate HCI implications.

Unless I'm on the nytimes website.

Having an iPad and doing a lot of reading on Flipboard has "untrained" me, and I don't think I do it anymore on any platform.

I don't select text when I read something in the terminal, though, only in GUI applications. I guess I don't like lines being selected completely for some reason.

BUT: I tend to select-all + copy any text of a form (this comment) before submitting. You never know when browser/back/website/connection is going to abandon you.

I get why people do it, but sheesh, take your hands off the mouse for a minute, it won't kill you!

Some sites nowadays add a floating header to the top of the page that changes size as you scroll down which is super distracting when reading the way I do.

but i'm surprised nobody brought this up yet: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/reasy/

you select text and it turns it into some speed reading format. tiny plugin and plain awesome

But I stopped selecting text right after... perhaps I began using a WebKit based browser. Sometimes, text selection in WebKit based browsers looks ugly and weird compared with that in Firefox, however, these browsers are just damned fast.

It helps me to keep things in my short-term memory or to actually extend my short-term memory.

Have you tried selecting text and doing circles or rectangles? Amazing satisfaction!

I doubt I'd have enough brain juice left at this stage to remember to use an add-on.

But it would be nice for very large texts, sparsely read and on normal attention conditions.

Notably, I don't do this at all with trackpads, only when using a mouse at the desktop.

Interesting.

This is my answer, and it's a habit I picked up while using Skype, since they don't track my position very well when new messages comes in. (OS X)

Maybe I'll become a convert.

I can't read anything on my iPhone without constantly messing with the highlight UI. It's so fun.

I just attributed this to ADD. But I do like the contrast.

It's a compulsive habit that I can't stop, it serves no practical reason whatsoever. I also bite my nails. Same problem.