Should the caret blink when some text is highlighted?

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi there
I’m polishing a lookandfeel implementation and found myself in front of this philosophical (becoming in my case very practical) question.

On one side you get examples like bootstrap where if you highlight text in a ‘texteditor’ (to use juce’s paradigm) the caret disappears if some text is highlighted. This is IMHO the most ux-consistent way: you always have only one entity bothering you. You can almost think that the caret is both the blinking cursor AND the highlighted background. It’s just a ‘fat non-blinking caret’ that signals you’ve selected something.

On the other side you have the default juce text editor implementation, together with I suppose many other examples( eg cLion) where you get both the blinking caret and the highlighted background.

So should the caret be around or not if some text is highlighted? Is there some UX sense behind this or ‘it just depends’ ?

2

I just explored both paradigms, and discovered the caret was nice to have when I wanted to use the arrow keys to extend, or shrink, the selection (ie. holding shift and using left/right arrow keys), in that I knew where those actions would operate from.

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