Wyrd Smythe

Okay, I see what you’re saying. The “with regard to websites” threw me. In the sense you mean, a double-click is a specific action of intent with regard to pretty much everything.

Double-clicking plain text in a webpage does have a well-known expectation: It highlights the word that was double-clicked. It often puts the section mode into word- (rather than character-) selection. (It works exactly that way in this edit box I’m typing into.) That is exactly why I’ve double-clicked text: I wanted to highlight text for a copy-n-paste.

However, this should be a fairly benign behavior. In particular it should not silently discard an open form with input in it. I suspect if the double-click was not bound to the Quick Edit action, there would be no issue.

In your example of a list and one email on that list, you are not editing the list, merely viewing it. The change in focus doesn’t destroy the list or silently discard your input.

But the binding of double-click to Quick Edit is just an observation. I think the binding is a design mistake. You should allow the natural “highlight word” action that most expect (and which would not require the major change of focus).

The much more severe problem is not prompting the user before discarding input. The real issue here is not prompting the user about losing their input.

The double-click is just one way that happens. As I’ve indicated, it can happen other ways, so my request is primarily to prevent that lossage.

No, not that I’m aware of. Everything is standard.

“Double-click is a specific action of intent with regards to websites.” I’m sorry, but I don’t know that that means.

Are you saying that, if you do what I describe above — double-clicking on some text — that it does not have the same result as clicking the Quick Edit link of that comment?

To re-emphasize, the real problem here is that there’s no alert or prompt to preserve a comment one is currently entering. I feel that violates the “principle of least surprise” for interface design (and results in lost effort — which is both surprising and frustrating).