Different right-click behaviour between OOo 1.1.x and 2.x

Petrushka · General User Joined: 29 Jun 2005 Posts: 7

Folks, hope you can help. I'm trying a migration from OOo 1.1.5 to OOo 2 and am finding a few things annoying. The main thing on my mind is the right-click behaviour, and I wonder if you can help me work out how to set it to behave like in OOo 1.

In OOo 1.1, you could right-click anywhere in a window, and get a context menu based on where the cursor was, or based on the selection if you had something selected. Now in OOo 2, when you right-click, everything is unselected and the cursor moves to the point where you right-clicked, unless you right-click within the selection -- which is quite difficult if you just want to change something where the cursor is, and still takes an extra few seconds if you've got a small selection, and is really ULTRA-difficult if you're trying to get the context menu for an object (e.g. text box) that is transparent and has no borders.

Is it possible to change this to the 1.1-like behaviour?

It was a HUGE timesaver not having to aim precisely at the cursor or selection to get the appropriate context menu. I'm puzzled as to why this was changed. I've just checked and found that the new right-click behaviour in OOo 2 is more Microsoft-Word-like, but that's not a great reason for making things more inconvenient. Besides other popular apps like e.g. Firefox or Thunderbird have right-click behaviour like OOo 1.1.x.

My day is being eaten up by lots of 5-second gaps where I have to aim the mouse ultra-carefully. Help -- please! OOo2 has lots of great stuff that I'd hate to miss out on, but I think I was more productive with OOo1.

RGB · Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2006 1:57 am Post subject:

I agree with you: the 'new' behaviour is worse than the old. I was a lot happier when I was able to correct a misspelled word with a right click without losing the cursor position!

Petrushka · General User Joined: 29 Jun 2005 Posts: 7

I've done a bit more research, and it seems it was changed intentionally and with malice aforethought: issues 20330 (http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=20330), 6413 (http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6413), and 9698 (http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9698).

Grrrrr. That makes me .... grumpy.

Sample quotations from the discussions of these issues:

Petrushka · General User Joined: 29 Jun 2005 Posts: 7

I've now added this as an enhancement request: issue 63188 (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=63188). It's less of a big deal for those who have a dedicated "context menu" key on their keyboards, but not everyone has those.