this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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You're willfully misreading: those operations are available.
The illustrative story
should have made the question clear.
You can't name a single OS now or in history where pure selection is possible yet no operations on the selection are available. It always existed for the sake of enabling operations on selections and never for its own sake. That it's an abortable, multistep process is beside the point: aborting it every time isn't the purpose. You're taking an incidental part of the design that was always a dependency for something else & treating it as a feature unto itself, which it never was. The use case for pure selection is fairly weak.
As stated before, it's a fair question whether the underlying issue (whatever leads people to purely select text) isn't better addressed by accessibility (a design that doesn't tempt them to purely text selection). In any case, an accessible design wouldn't obscure selections.
I think we've had a big misunderstanding here, partly because I got annoyed for you calling something others use as pointless.
I'm not trying to argue that NOTHING other than text selection should be possible. That would be annoying. From my very first comment is said people highlight to copy text. The very first one. Just that this incidental "feature" of temporarily highlighting text is clearly a useful one. People DO want to just select the text sometimes. But also copy, search, whatever.
Just because you don't use text selection this way, doesn't mean it isn't useful. (The reason I got annoyed at you calling it "pointless", though, I see now this is because of a misunderstanding)
Hell, I do it not only for myself, but when sharing my screen at work, and pointing out specific pieces of text. Makes it very easy to quickly bring my colleagues eyes to the specific spot I'm talking about in the text.
This isn't what I'm arguing. Non-copyable text is a great sin. But there are plenty of programs that don't offer a pop-up, off the top of my head: Bluebeam Revu, Notepad++, many web browsers (but as mentioned, not Edge who's implementation of popup options sucks and gets in the way), the list goes on.
I am not against all popups, just the ones that prevent you from reading the text you just highlighted.
This isn't even just an accessibility thing, getting in the way of the text you highlighted is just annoying.