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I'm trying to make my 97 years old grandma's laptop (Ubuntu 20.04) more accessible for her. She is often frustrated because text that she has written vanishes. Disabling the touchpad and using an external mouse already helped a lot. But I suspect that she still accidentally selects text, when she tries to place the text cursor with her mouse (by dragging or double-clicking). When she continues typing the selected text is being overwritten. Because she needs to focus on the keyboard while typing she won't notice immediately what happened, making it difficult to "Undo".

  1. Would it be possible to disable this behavior so that selected text would be deselected instead of replaced, when typing?
  2. Is this a feature provided by the Linux system or is it implemented in each program? (Programs of interest are LibreOffice Writer and Mozilla Thunderbird)
  3. If changing the behavior is not possible, can I disable text selection via mouse in general?

Edit:

As suggested by @user-dz I created separate questions on how to address this issue in LibreOffice Writer and Thunderbird.
This question remains focused on how to solve this system-wide in Ubuntu 20.04.

Pablo Bianchi
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Anton S.
  • 219

2 Answers2

2

The selected text is copied to PRIMARY selection buffer. You could monitor it and send Right arrow key if it changes, to move to the end of the selected text. This works with any application, not only LibreOffice/Thunderbird, at least on X11+GNOME.

# Install dependencies
sudo apt install xdotool  git build-essential libx11-dev libxtst-dev

Compile clipnotify


git clone https://github.com/cdown/clipnotify.git
cd clipnotify
make


Run the monitor, could be on ~/.xprofile, or under ~/.config/autostart/


while ./clipnotify;do xdotool key Right; done


Optional: To kill the monitor on any other Terminal


killall clipnotify

Probably are better ways to do this, maybe using Dbus.

Inspiration and useful links:

Pablo Bianchi
  • 17,371
1

Partial answer

  • (2) LiberOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox, each has its own implementation of text edit box.

    But there many tool that are build on top of a GUI kit like GTK, Qt, wxWidgets,.. So you may expect Gnome tools to be GTK based and KDE tools to be based on Qt. So change may be required at their level.

  • (3) With LibreOffice, I have only found this feature that may help:

    • Change the "selection mode" at the bottom status bar to "Block selection". Still can select with mouse but not double click.

  • (3) For Mouse Accessibility, I don't remember any action that require double-click (Only CAD, Games, IDE). Usually, tools have other way using keyboard shortcut or menu entry.

    • Disable double-click, Settings → Accessibility → Double-click Delay: Shortest (minimum).

  • (3) Mouse Settings, The previous step does not fix selection by Drag. A trick that may work is killing short moves by lowering pointer speed and raising its acceleration to compensate for long moves.

    • Settings → Mouse & Touchpad → Mouse Speed: Lower

    • Mouse Acceleration: Higher using

      xset [mouse [accel_mult[/accel_div] [threshold]]] [mouse default]

      (Permanent setting, should be a way using libinput or X)

  • (3) Minimize use of mouse for short moves (It may be hard to adapt)

    • Use of keyboard to move
    • Activate keyboard mouse keys, Settings → Accessibility → Mouse Keys
    • Change to TrackBall mouse
user.dz
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