Highlight-on-selection mode

⭐️Feature Requests
#1

If you’d accept a PR for the following, I’d be happy to give it a go! Just let me know.

Right now, highlighting a selection requires two steps:

  1. Select the text you’d like to highlight
  2. Press the highlight shortcut to highlight that selection

I would love to have the option to streamline this to just one step:

  1. Select the text you’d like to highlight, and when you complete the selection it automatically makes the highlight, without having to press any shortcut

I realize this is probably not the behavior everyone would want, so it could be an option in Settings.

#2

Hey Devon!

thanks for the offer on the PR. :pray:

I gotta check with the team as we had a strategy session today and it depends on how involved we need be on this (hint: we are super short on time right now)

Implementation wise I could see this working with a keyboard shortcut, so that you press e.g. cmd+meta+h and then go on “highlighting spree”.

We are actually also currently thinking on how to improve the overall highlighting situation as many people get super annoyed by the popups and uninstall memex.

1 Like
#3

FWIW, I can’t get the “Position tooltip below mouse pointer” mode to work reliably.

A hotkey for highlighting would be neat, but I’d like it to be customizable. Before I knew about Memex I wrote an extension to highlight text that used ctrl+c, which on Mac doesn’t clash with the copy hotkey. It was very quick, and made it easy to both highlight something for myself and then immediately copy it for sharing.

For Memex, have you considered using the context menu API? Select text, right click, and there could be a Memex sub-menu. The Google Keep extension uses this approach, and it is low friction without being obtrusive.

https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/contextMenus

Having the options in the side menu, grayed out unless text was selected, would also seem natural to me.

#4

Hey @hopula

Thanks for dropping by and your great suggestions!
Good news: Context menu integration is on its way in Memex 2.2 (already in Chrome Store review so should go out any day - Firefox already launched)

FWIW, I can’t get the “Position tooltip below mouse pointer” mode to work reliably.

What doesn’t work there?

#5

What doesn’t work there?

Sometimes the tooltip appears at a seemingly random spot toward the middle of the page. Most of the time I don’t see it at all.

Maybe it is working and I just don’t understand how it should be working?

#6

Yeah that can happen when you accidentally highlight an empty space, or double click on the text of a button.
You can also use the keyboard shortcuts btw. (thats my personal favourite of using this feature)

the setting “below mouse pointer” means that it will appear where the mouse is when you highlight stuff. the other setting means it will appear below the text that you highlighted.