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Text selection with the Keyboard on IE8 – Caret Browsing

Posted by Asif Iqbal on Jun 5th, 2009 and filed under Tips and Tricks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

In older versions of IE it was often diffcult or impossible to select exactly the text you wanted to copy into an e-mail or a document. When you dragged the mouse to select text, you often selected adjacent paragraphs or columns also, even though you didn’t want them. IE8 fnally solves this problem by imitating Firefox’s “caret browsing” feature, in which you select text by moving the arrow keys.

When you Press F7, IE8 will promot to active Caret Browsing:
Text selection with the Keyboard on IE8   Caret Browsing

After Caret Browsing Activated:
Text selection with the Keyboard on IE8   Caret Browsing

Just press F7, or Page | Caret Browsing, and use the arrow keys or other navigation to find the place in the text where you want to start copying; hold down the Shift key and use the arrows or other navigation keys to extend the selection. Ctrl-C then copies the selected text to the clipboard. It would have been nice if Web browsers used F8 (the “extend selection” key in Microsoft Office instead of F7 for this feature, but you can’t have everthing.

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