Last modified: 2013-05-24 20:10:46 UTC
From a user suggestion: | Normally word processors and text editors have a left margin, allowing | whole lines to be selected. There would normally be a small gap of a few | pixels between the left column of text and the left margin, allowing a | "margin of error" for regular text selection. To the left of this gap, | any clicks select entire lines, and any drags up or down select many | lines at once. | | I don't know if there is a need for the complete left margin | functionality in VisualEditor, but certainly, the editing area shouldn't | stop at the exact edge of the letters. Perhaps the padding on the VE | container needs to be increased with a compensating decrease in the | margin - or maybe that's totally wrong, but you get the idea.
For the first part, some IDEs do this (e.g. Sublime), but LO, Google Docs & gedit don't. The downside is it reduces the target zone for placing the cursor at the start of a line. For the second part, we already have left padding into which you can click to position the cursor at the start of the line.
After discussion with the team, we feel that this doesn't make sense because this is mostly a feature that makes sense in line-based editors (generally, for code), and VE is not one of these.
