Subject: 24.1.50; mouse selection followed by cursor movment to extend selection

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:07:38 -0700

In Emacs versions prior to Emacs 23 an important feature was the
ability to extend or reduce the active region by moving the cursor.
E.g C-SPC followed by C-f.
 
And it did not matter how the region was activated (how the mark was
set).  You could, for example, double-click a word or a line or a
sexp using mouse-1, then use C-f or M-f to extend the region etc.
 
This is alas no longer the case, at least by default.  The manual
should explain, somewhere, how to obtain this desirable and
longstanding behavior again.  It is one of the features that
made Emacs superior to other text editors.
 
`(emacs) Setting Mark' says you can set the mark with the mouse.
And it mentions that you can use Shift with cursor commands.
But it does not explain how to extend/reduce the region _without_
resorting to Shift.  Lot of good it does to set the mark with
the mouse if its being set does not really mean that it is set (!)
and that the selection stays active.
 
Similarly, `(emacs) Shift Selection' says nothing about how to obtain
this same region-extending behavior without shifting.  It says that
you can turn off shift selection by setting `shift-selection-mode' to
nil, but that does not restore the behavior of unshifted selection
extension.
 
[BTW, `shift-select-mode' is a terrible name for this user option.
There is no such "mode".  It is a boolean option and its name should
reflect that, saying what the on (preferably, or even the off) value
actually *does*.  But `-mode' should not at all be part of the name.]
 
Where is this documented?  How can a user get region extension without
resorting to the shift key, as before?
 
To try to restore the former, sane, behavior, I've set these (on
Windows, where there is no `x-enable-primary'):
 
 `select-active-regions'  to nil
 `x-enable-clipboard'     to t
 `mouse-drag-copy-region' to t
 
(I also use `delete-selection-mode').  But none of that fixes this
breakage.  How to get back to ordinary region extension by moving
point, without having to shift?
 
At least it still works out of the box to set the mark using C-SPC and
then extend the region using cursor movement.  I do not even see this
behavior documented, however, though perhaps it is somewhere.
 
But how to get mark-setting by the mouse to likewise act normally
(i.e., as it used to), so that UNshifted cursor motion extends the
region?  How to get mouse selection to act like any other way of
selecting the region?

It is truly a _shame_ that Emacs has stooped to replicating the
limited selection behavior of lesser text editors.  Will we in
future lose even more selection functionality and be reduced to
dragging the mouse as the only way to select text?  Shameful.

In GNU Emacs 24.1.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2012-04-23 on MARVIN
Bzr revision: 108006
[email-masked]
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
Configured using:
 `configure --with-gcc (4.6) --no-opt --enable-checking --cflags
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/src
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libpng-dev_1.4.3-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/zlib-dev_1.2.5-2/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/giflib-4.1.4-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/jpeg-6b-4/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/tiff-3.8.2-1/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/gnutls-3.0.9/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libiconv-1.13.1-1-dev/include
 -ID:/devel/emacs/libs/libxml2-2.7.8/include/libxml2'