Re: Need opinion about GUI design / OS behavior bug...
I have no doubt that HIDING the caret completely on losing focus
is correct. That is obviously correct and the expected behavior.
We are not talking about losing focus though. Menus don't take
focus.
Of course they take focus. How do you think menus receive mouse
clicks and keyboard input?
Obviously some people care because MICROSOFT spent time, money
and resources to get specific caret behavior in Visual Studio.
I don't think that MS intentionally implemented this behavior in
VS. VS uses its own custom nenus instead of regular windows menu.
Apparently, VS context menu doesn't care about WM_SYSTIMER and
passes it to the parent window to process, while regular menu eats
the message in its modal loop.
Anyways, so just to confirm, you definitely think flashing the
caret when the menu is open is wrong in all cases? Context menu
or otherwise?
Correct. Flashing caret should indicate current point of keyboard
input. If a window cannot receive keyboard input, then it
shouldn't show the caret.
However, you don't think it is necessary to indicate the caret
position (even in the non flashing state) for menu operations
such as paste?
Probably, this is the single case where special treatment of the
caret would be worth your while. But, personally, I do Ctrl+V in
99.999% of cases rather than context menu -> paste. I almost never
do paste via window Edit menu.
Alex