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alex_kac · Feb 6, 2007, 12:37 PM

I've been using a Mac since 1992 but I have one major issue in OS X. Text Selection. I can never find the selection when I use Find or what not because its simply not intuitive on the Mac. Here is what I mean. The text has a highlight over it, but the text color itself is still black, blue or whatever its color is everywhere else. As such there is little differentiation when you have many other color hues on a web page, design document, or what not. Its REALLY hard to find on the screen.

Under Windows the text has a highlight color so that its very easy to see. I remember first using the find on WIndows and being overjoyed on this one thing.

To me its such a major thing that I cannot believe I'm the only one. Maybe its because I spend so much in text writing docs and code. If there are others - do you know of a workaround? And btw - I'm not looking for "well you shouldn't like it that way - its not the Mac way" type of BS. As an ex-Apple employee, Mac user for 15 years, and owner of 6 current Macs and about 40 over the last 15 years plus managing another 20 in a business I don't think any of that would be valid. Of course its possible I've missed some setting somewhere - I admit that's possible.

Chuckit · Feb 6, 2007, 12:54 PM

Set the highlight color to something much more eye-catching and annoying? I honestly don't find that I keep things selected for long enough to forgot what I've selected. And I work with text all day long. What exactly is it you're looking for? Text to reverse when you select it?

ccrider · Feb 6, 2007, 12:58 PM

Yes, change the highlight color- that's one of the first things I do when setting up a new computer.

Go to system prefs/Appearance (very top left). Change the highlight color to "other" and select a few colors till you get it right. Keep the panel open whilst you check in your browser till you get it right. Personally I like an orangy color (rgb 255/133/88).

Hope that helps!

alex_kac · Feb 6, 2007, 02:03 PM

Yes, I've changed the highlight color many times, but that does not help. The problem is the text itself.

Let me explain further. I can use a light color and therefore read the text since most text is dark, but then have a really really hard time finding the selection. OR I can use a dark highlight color (which is my preference), but then cannot read the text that is highlighted. Which is better (but still far from perfect) for when I'm searching, but not fine for the rest of my computer use when I select text in any other usage.

However if the text had a highlight color, then I could make my selection dark and my highlight color light and voila - all issues are solved.

So the question is - is there any hack or secret setting via "defaults" or what not that would let me set the default highlight text on OS X.

alex_kac · Feb 6, 2007, 02:06 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Set the highlight color to something much more eye-catching and annoying? I honestly don't find that I keep things selected for long enough to forgot what I've selected. And I work with text all day long. What exactly is it you're looking for? Text to reverse when you select it?

Yes. You are right that when I'm editing, the selection highlight is fine, but not when I'm searching. Do a search for a word on this web page. Can you find where that search highlight is? Not immediately I bet unless you already knew where to look.

Safari 3.0 in Leopard acknowledges this problem because they add this new special highlight. But what about other apps other than Safari? What about in XCode? Or BBEdit? Or Mail? It'd be far better I think to have a dark selection and light text color as it would fit all uses, not just specialized cases like Safari.

There are many times I'm searching for a specific word in a document and literally have to read the entire page to find the word - the search only gets me to the right "area". I simply cannot see the selection in any obvious fashion.

Mithras · Feb 6, 2007, 07:42 PM