How to immediately drop a selection

[birnle]

Hi all,

This is my first post in this forum. Nice to meet you!

The following (maybe not Nisus but macOS [10.15.7]?) problem drives me crazy :

1. I select text. (A little square is displayed at the end of the selection.)
2. Now I click and hold on the selection to drag it. (The context menu of the little square opens.)
3. I drag, but nothing happens (because the focus is on the context window I never need).
4. So I have to wait several seconds and/or press Esc to close the context window to get rid of it.
5. Then I can drag the selection. Or I can’t, sometimes the context window or square appears again.

Well, I can

1. select,
2. press escape and
3. (without moving the mouse) click to drag,

but it should be possible to deactivate the little square / context window function.

Is it possible? How can I do it?

I never need this square, and if I need a context window I make a secondary click or tap. It would be great if someone would help me see the light … Thank you in advance.

[Vanceone]

Do you happen to have any of the Mac OS X accessibility features turned on such as Mouse Keys or Sticky Keys?

[birnle]

No …

[adryan]

G'day, birnie et al

Welcome to Nisus Writer.

I haven't experienced this, so I agree with Vanceone that some Accessibility setting would be a good place to start; however, I can find no relevant setting amongst the Accessibility settings in my operating system. So I'm afraid I have no solution here, but the following thoughts might help in troubleshooting.

See if the unwanted behavior persists after a computer Restart.

See what happens in a Pages document and in a TextEdit document. (Make sure you can see any invisibles.) If you see the unwanted behavior with either of these, it probably relates to a preference setting or a bug in your operating system, rather than to Nisus Writer.

When it comes to Nisus Writer, does it only happen in a specific document or in any Nisus document? Was the text in question all generated within Nisus Writer Pro or did it originate from some other application?

Try creating a new document with stock-standard "Lorem ipsum" content:–

Macro > Document > Lorem Ipsum

Still seeing the problem there?

Does the manner of selection make a difference? Double-click vs click-and-drag vs Find result.

It might be helpful (to someone!) to post one or two screenshots of the situation, showing the little square and the items displayed in the contextual menu.

Cheers,
Adrian

[martin]

This is my first post in this forum. Nice to meet you!
...
1. I select text. (A little square is displayed at the end of the selection.)

Welcome to the forums!

When you say a "little square" does it look like this:

context-tri.png (6.77 KiB) Viewed 6961 times

That indicator is sometimes shown by macOS to let you apply various services/extensions to the selected content. Normally the indicator only appears when an image is selected, so you can use Apple's so-called Markup actions to edit the image.

However, I have seen it reported that this indicator can be shown for all text selections, which is a nuisance. Usually the problem is caused by some text-based service/extension. To fix this you should disable the unwanted service:

1. Open your macOS system preferences.
2. Switch to the Extensions pane.
3. From the list on the left side, select and look through various extension categories like "All" and "Actions".
4. From the extensions listed on the right side, disable the unwanted text editing extensions.

I hope that helps!