Mastodawn

slae 🍥Jan 17

Amir E. Aharoni

I'm a forty-five-year-old man, and I've been using desktop web browsers for twenty-eight of them, and only a few months ago I learned how to highlight text that is a hyperlink without clicking the link: by holding Alt why highlighting. I use it many times a day now. How did even use the web before that?

In case you still didn't know it, now you do.

Thank you @jhsoby for teaching me this.

KuboF Hromoslav bio/acc 🧬Jan 11

Cool! I will start using it also!

Up until now I have just started highlighting a bit before / after the text.

@kubofhromoslav me too, though depending on browser, you can also right click and get an option to select link text.

Yaron Kaplan Jan 13

@aharoni @jhsoby

It doesn't always work...

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 13

@Luckluster @jhsoby Do you have examples of when it doesn't work?

Yaron Kaplan Jan 13

I'll try to find and I'll get back to you. I think it's JS-related issues.

Rihards Olups Jan 14

@Luckluster @aharoni Some JS-heavy solutions still grab the mouse click.
In some of those cases, releasing alt and holding down the mouse button, then copying works - but releasing the mouse button afterwards still interacts with the control.

Yes, that’s what we get for stuffing everything in browsers :)

peter (not the famous one)Jan 14

@aharoni @Luckluster @jhsoby There are several window managers in the linux and BSD world where holding down the alt key while clicking on a window anywhere instead moves it (without grabbing the title bar explicitly), so this doesn't work for me in particular.

@aharoni @jhsoby

Holy cow!!

🌸 lily 🏳️‍⚧️

θΔ ⋐ & ∞Jan 13

@aharoni @jhsoby i don't know when i learned this but it's so important
this should be basic knowledge about browsing the web imo

jasonkarns Jan 13

@aharoni @jhsoby which OS!?

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 13

@jasonkarns @jhsoby Works for me on desktop Ubuntu in Firefox and Chromium. I'm too lazy/busy to try other things.

jasonkarns Jan 15

@aharoni @jhsoby lol, i didn't mean for you to know exhaustively :D was just curious which OS you were on.

I'm excited to try this because I live on the keyboard and didn't know about this!!!

@aharoni @jhsoby

Also useful: typing ' will bring up a search field that only searches links. Very useful for navigating without mouse use.

DK4HAA - Harm Jan 13

@simulo @aharoni @jhsoby 🤯

@aharoni @jhsoby

that might be a bit theoretical and UI-design nerdy but I like that it enables keyboard only navigation without some sort of vi-mode or other paradigm change, you just get a search bar with a specialized behavior: If you know how Ctrl+F works, this only needs a minor extension of your knowledge and you got it.

Grégory Colpart Jan 13

@aharoni @jhsoby in which browser? On Firefox/XFCE it doesn't seem to work :/

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 13

@gcolpart @jhsoby Works for me in GNOME in Firefox. Perhaps an XFCE or Firefox bug?

Tim Chase Jan 16

does alt+left-mouse-drag move the window? XFCE might be intercepting it (I remap this to Logo/Win/Mod4+drag rather than alt+drag because a number of applications expect you to be able to alt+drag)

@aharoni @jhsoby

Steven Garrity Jan 13

@aharoni @jhsoby

OH

MY

GOD

@aharoni @jhsoby

On the other hand, it's possible you've known the capital of Maine for the last 35 or so. We learned them all but we started with Maine, so that will probably be the last one I forget. I believe it's on a river that I knew the trisyllabic name of as well - but I will refrain from checking. We didn't learn much about web browsers though. Or even about the telephone switching network. Which, in the 1950s, might have been more plausible.

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 13

@glc @jhsoby I've known the capitals of most countries since I was five or so (my favorite has always been Managua), but I'm much less good with U.S. state capitals :(

But I remember very well that when I was 12, I learned what the capital of #RhodeIsland is, and strangely enough, thirty-one years later, I moved there.

@aharoni @jhsoby

Mysterious are the ways of providence.

Three score and Eleven 😱👀🥸Jan 14

@aharoni @jhsoby
On a mac it's command c

Marc Trius Jan 14

אייר אברמסקי־קרוננברג ☮️Jan 14

@aharoni @jhsoby

OMFG this is amazing!! 😮

Tit for tat: Here’s another tip that has to do with selecting in the browser. If you select some text you can link to it by right clicking or pressing the ≣ Menu key and then choosing ‘Copy Link to Highlight’ (in LibreWolf/Firefox). It creates a text fragment link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment#Proposals; or should I say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment#:~:text=Text%20Fragments 🙃).

URI fragment - Wikipedia

Chozari 賈 (she/her)Jan 14

@aharoni I too am 45 and did not know this. But I avoid my laptop like the plague, so… @jhsoby

Abazigal Jan 14

@aharoni Hmm, I always just move my cursor a little in front of the link and highlight it from there?

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 14

@Abazigal That's what I did from 1997 until 2025, and I never enjoyed it.

Benoît B.Jan 14

@aharoni @jhsoby

O.M.G.!

Same here, but replace forty-five-year-old man with fifty-seven-year-old man and using web browsers for twenty-eight years with twenty-nine years.

This is amazing (as we age, we have simpler joys). Thank you very (very) much for that tip!

@aharoni @jhsoby

TIL

thank you for this.

Jernej Simončič �Jan 15

@aharoni @jhsoby Interesting, I've been using Select like a Boss extension, which replicates the old Opera behaviour.

GitHub - lcandy2/Select-like-a-Boss: Select link's text just like a regular text (like in Opera'12 browser) - Select like a Boss ;)

Select link's text just like a regular text (like in Opera'12 browser) - Select like a Boss ;) - lcandy2/Select-like-a-Boss

GitHub

Garrett Wollman Jan 15

@aharoni I can't do that, because alt+click combinations are reserved by my window manager.

Tim Chase Jan 16

Might check to see if your window-manager lets you remap that. I use Fluxbox and have Mod4 (AKA "Logo" or "Win" key) + LMB/RMB to move/resize windows for exactly this reason—applications like GIMP, Inkscape, Blender (and apparently Firefox) want to use alt+drag for useful features.

Garrett Wollman Jan 16

@gumnos My window manager was explicitly configured to do that, in 1989.

Tim Chase Jan 16

@wollman hah, back before the 104/105-key keyboard was a thing 😆

I tweaked Fluxbox many years ago (around the turn of the century) so that the Win/Logo/Mod4 key was my "I'm talking to the window-manager" key—all my window ops for moving, resizing, window-switching, maximizing, minimizing, launching applications, etc—because applications tend to use alt but not Win/Logo/Mod4

Garrett Wollman Jan 16

@gumnos I intentionally do not purchase tiny-space-bar keyboards.

Sinnamon (despicable arc 😈)Jan 16

@wollman @aharoni Ctrl + Alt + click might work for you as good as for me (Alt + drag & drop is used to move window in my desktop)

Now that I'm writing in this thread, I have to say that I did that kind of complex text selection by using caret browsing (F7), which forces the text cursor and allows you to move it around, select text and do other kind of stuff.

:kura_explode:Jan 15

@jhsoby @aharoni (in Firefox at least) you can hold shift and right click to force open the native conext menu,for websites that add their own context menu .

Mute Dog Brewing Jan 15

@aharoni @jhsoby I've only worked as a web developer for ~27 years so it makes sense that I wouldn't know about this...

Piper has moved Jan 15

@aharoni …this changes everything.

potion_genderqueer

Daaaaaaaayum. I'm fifty-mumble, and I didn't know that either. Now I do.

@jhsoby Thank you, kind ser.

@aharoni @jhsoby ummm . Why exactly would you need to hilite texts as a hyperlink? What is the use case for this practice? Your solution may indeed work, but I don't understand the reason for it.

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 16

@otto42 @jhsoby It's useful when a piece of text is already a hyperlink, and you want to copy it.

@aharoni Why don't you just right click it and select "copy link"?

Henrik Pauli Jan 16

@otto42 @aharoni I was wondering the same :D Meticulously selecting seems to be a bit cumbersome even with the link interaction not interfering.

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 16

@phl @otto42 On Firefox and Chromium on desktop Ubuntu, right click + copy link copies the URL and not the text.

Henrik Pauli Jan 16

@aharoni @otto42 ohhh I was visualising the whole thing being visually a URL too! Now it makes sense.

Henrik Pauli Jan 16

@aharoni @otto42 a Copy Link Text menu item would be a terrific feature

Amir E. Aharoni Jan 16

@phl @otto42 maybe, but sometimes I want to copy only a part of the text. I can copy more and delete, but why should it be different for links?

Tim Chase Jan 16

wait, wut?! 🤯

I've just always started dragging before the link, then drag over the entire link and clean up any leading garbage when I paste it.

Appears to work for that annoying Salesforce tab containing the case-number that I need to copy/paste, but clicking on it activates the link. 😌

RyeNCode 🇨🇦Jan 16

@aharoni @jhsoby as others have mentioned, your mileage may vary...
Well behaving websites won't need with this, many others do though.

I'm finding myself more and more needing to utilize the dev console to effectively use many sites these days.
From removing hard-sell overlays to subscribe or disable my (network wide) ad blocker, to just trying to select some text to copy and paste, it has become a unavailable tool.

@aharoni @jhsoby OMG I've got 13 years on you and *thank you very much* <3

LIPSERVANT Jan 16

@aharoni @jhsoby
I was this days old when.

Henrik Pauli Jan 16

@aharoni @jhsoby I'll add another Firefox (Gecko) trick: Have you noticed that if you're looking at a <table> and you Ctrl-click a cell it gets a little border?

Well, Gecko allows you to select cells of a HTML table and e.g. copy them to the clipboard — selectively, not merely the complete flow of text as with a normal click and drag select.

@aharoni @jhsoby #TIL