cell-based select-all and copy

[gordonwoodhull]

Right now ctrl/cmd-A selects all the text in the notebook, as if you'd dragged the mouse across all of it.

ctrl/cmd-C copies the selected text, skipping over the intervening cell titles.

Now that we have multiple selection, I think it makes more sense for ctrl/cmd-A to select all the cells, and for ctrl/cmd-C to copy the text of the selected cells if there is any cell selection.

Edge case: what if there are both text and cells selected? Possible resolutions:

1. assume text selection is more specific, ignore cell selection
2. favor cell selection over text selection
3. favor whichever was changed later
4. compute the intersection (!)

3 is perhaps the most faithful to what the user requested. 4 is perhaps the most precise but probably confusing. 1 and 2 are the easiest to explain.

On the other hand, 3 could be implemented by only allowing one kind of selection or the other, i.e. removing any cell selection if a text selection happens, and vice versa.

I'm undecided and prefer to leave this open for discussion for a couple weeks. It's pretty clear that ctrl/cmd-A should have the same effect as the select all commands in the selection bar, selecting the cells not the content. The old behavior was just a temporary hack.

[shaneporter]

'ctrl a' seems like a nice shortcut to select all the cells (and by select, I mean as if the user checked each 'select' checkbox'), but any copying of those cells' text with a subsequent 'copy' action isn't at all obvious to me. If anything, the existing action makes sense.

[gordonwoodhull]

Would it make sense if you could also paste cells? 😜

Given that Copy currently does nothing if nothing is selected, I think copying the code of the cells only if there is no text selection would be safe. Say you wanted to copy and paste a few cells into RStudio. But I'm not clear if it should copy both the code and results in that case.

So yeah, let's leave the cell copying part to simmer, and just do select-all for now.