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I'm getting odd selection bugs in Mathematica (starting in 10.0.1.0, OS X 10.10 and still present in 10.3.1.0, OS X 10.11.2) that are making it impossible to use. For example if I simply click before the 'i' in With I get

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while if I click after the 't' I get

enter image description here

and if I click after the '=' in mp = I get

enter image description here

Attempts to drag out a selection produce similarly bizzare results, with the selection extending several to many characters ahead of the dragged location, in starts and fits; while double-clicking selects huge blocks of code.

This happens in fresh notebooks in fresh Mathematica sessions into which any amount of code has been pasted or typed. Obviously this makes it impossible to get anything done. Has anyone else seen this bug? Is there something I could reset or disable that might be the cause?

orome
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  • When you state "click before the 'i'" do you mean click and then drag or is Mathematica decided that you must want to select something with a single left-click of the mouse button? – bobthechemist Nov 07 '14 at 17:17
  • have you tried blowing away the FE caches ($UserBaseDirectory\FrontEnd\)? – rcollyer Nov 07 '14 at 17:23
  • @bobthechemist: Just click; no dragging at all. Mathematica is doing the rest on its own. – orome Nov 07 '14 at 17:26
  • @rcollyer: No. What are those and how do I do that? – orome Nov 07 '14 at 17:26
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    @raxacoricofallapatorius go to the directory I pointed out above, and delete the directories with Cache in their name. Let me know if it helps. – rcollyer Nov 07 '14 at 17:28
  • @rcollyer On my machine (Win7 x64) these directories are located in $HomeDirectory <> "/AppData/Local/Mathematica/FrontEnd". – Alexey Popkov Nov 07 '14 at 18:06
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    http://support.wolfram.com/kb/12464 – chuy Nov 07 '14 at 18:58
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    @rcollyer: Wolfram's "support" explains: "This sounds like a dirty track pad or a faulty mouse." FWIW: I didn't see selection or responsiveness issues in ANY other applications, and removing caches fixed the issue (for now). – orome Nov 19 '14 at 15:23
  • @raxacoricofallapatorius thanks for the info. – rcollyer Nov 19 '14 at 16:15
  • @rcollyer: No further interest from Mathematica ("Premier") "Support" other than to blame the mouse. – orome Nov 25 '14 at 21:15
  • @raxacoricofallapatorius I don't know what to tell you. But, I will keep an eye out for it. – rcollyer Nov 25 '14 at 21:25
  • @rcollyer: Thanks! And if you have any ideas on how to get Wolfram's "Support" to work, let me know. – orome Nov 25 '14 at 21:26
  • @rcollyer: Update. The bug us back. Still no interest in this problem from Wolfram's expensive "Support". – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:20
  • Have you tried dropping back to 9 to make sure the bug goes away? – rogerl Dec 25 '15 at 13:29
  • @rogerl: I'm not sure why I'd want to do that. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:36
  • Well, up to you, obviously, but a) if you still have it on your machine it's easy to try, and b) if the bug does go away you have something definitive you can go back to Wolfram with. – rogerl Dec 25 '15 at 13:37
  • @rogerl: I think I have something pretty definitive to discuss with Wolfram now. Better would be this: Open Mathematica, create a new notebook, select the first line of code in this answer (from the s to the ;), copy and paste into the new notebook; then click somewhere in the pasted text. What do you see? – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:41
  • I see exactly what I expect; the cursor ends up between two appropriate characters, and nothing is selected. – rogerl Dec 25 '15 at 13:44
  • @rogerl: OK, now bookmark this and try that now and again over the next months. Eventually you'll get the same behavior I see. Try to note anything that you can that might be different about the time the but appears (I can't) and let me know here. Once it starts happening it should keep happening for a while. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:48
  • I just noticed the length of time between your deleting the cache info and the bug reappearing. Certainly suggests crap building up somewhere. I'll keep this in mind. – rogerl Dec 25 '15 at 13:50
  • @rogerl: Any idea why this should appear only (at least now) in new notebooks? I can past exactly the same text into and existing or even a duplicate ("Save As...") notebook and not get the error. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:54
  • @rogerl: I'm pretty sure the cache has nothing to do with it. This spans version updates. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:55
  • No ideas, sorry. All seems pretty odd. – rogerl Dec 25 '15 at 13:55
  • @rogerl: No kidding. Out of the blue I'm just shut down, and without any support (for the most expensive app I own!)! – orome Dec 25 '15 at 13:56
  • I'm not seeing any such difficulty with your code in Mathematica 10.3.1 under OS X 10.11.2 (El Capitan). – murray Dec 25 '15 at 16:06
  • If you want folks to try to replicate the errant behavior your report, please edit the question so as to include displayed copyable code -- not just an image. – murray Dec 25 '15 at 16:06
  • @murray: Paste anything at all into a new (and sometimes existing) notebook. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 17:27
  • @raxacoricofallapatorius: I don't understand your comment about pasting anything into a new notebook -- what about doing that? (I copy and paste between notebooks all the time without difficulty.) – murray Dec 25 '15 at 21:08
  • @murray: So do I most of the time; and I don't understand it either. But after months of working, I can do almost anything (pasting seems to be the trigger) and then I get this behavior. – orome Dec 25 '15 at 22:23

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I just had a similar thing start happening to me. I think it is, in fact, related to a bad/dirty mouse combined with some weird modal-selection behavior in Mathematica on a double-click (in my case, Mathematica 11.3 on OSX 10.14).

One can single-click to place the insert cursor within a word, or double-click to select the entire world (another click to select the entire line). Once we've entered word or line-select mode, then for the next few seconds I am unable to single-clock to insert the cursor within a different word. Instead it will stay in word-select mode and select the entire new word (and then we are in word-select mode for several more seconds).

It was extremely frustrating until I learned the following trick: "when you are stuck in this mode, instead of frantically clicking around trying to get out of it--instead just count to 5 before clicking again on the new word. works every time".

By the way, the reason I think that a "bad mouse" is a contributing factor is that a common failure mode of bad/dirty mouse is that they start registering double-clicks on a single-click. That puts one into word-selection mode accidentally and then we're trapped until we do the "count to 5" thing.

Brannon Batson
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