New iMac: Magic Mouse Highlights Everything on Right-Click

[sunseeker]

I have an issue that I am hoping you can help resolve. Every time I right click on text on Google's Search results (or elsewhere, it highlights the text.

I do not want this to happen.

I am using the magic mouse currently, and would love to know how to change this in settings.

You said you do not want this to happen.
Why?
What do you want to happen instead?

Should the right click be interacting with the space between the characters?

Perhaps you're trying to select one word in the text of a link and it's selecting the more than you want 🤔

 

[TurboCoder2022]

I think it's a great app. As to it behaving as it should I guess that depends on what behavior you want. I prefer the way Firefox behaves.

To answer this one...this behavior happens in Chrome. Not Safari.

I've decided to just get used to it, since there isn't a fix.

 

[russell_314]

To answer this one...this behavior happens in Chrome. Not Safari.

I've decided to just get used to it, since there isn't a fix.

I don’t use Chrome on my Mac. I prefer to keep chrome on my Chromebooks 😂

For me it did it on Safari, but wasn’t doing it on Firefox

 

[Nermal]

To answer this one...this behavior happens in Chrome. Not Safari.

Are you saying it doesn't happen in Safari (it should), or that you haven't tried it in Safari?

 

[cotterface]

It's standard system behavior (Ventura), so I'd be surprised if FireFox didn't do it too. But it appears to only highlights text (or Finder icons). Right clicking on an image in a browser doesn't highlight the image.

this is my nightmare ... if the page or section is editable, mac highlights and selects text when you right click. you are NOT allowed to right click without selecting SOMETHING, even if it's only a space. the "right click, paste" function is actually "right click, REPLACE" because it is REQUIRED to replace something. it is like a mean trick or a curse, especially for someone who lives on the mouse and is pasting things all day long...

i would love to just copy a section of something, then paste it between 2 words or sentences without needing to press space bar a few times so when i right click it can grab the spaces instead of one of the words .. i would love to simply right click and it paste it exactly where i clicked, rather than pasting it over a defaultly selected word

i've searched for answers off and on for years, and this thread is the first thing i've seen that acknowledges the issue explicitly, so i'd love some advice or guidance in changing this setting

 

[cotterface]

It's the OS. Apps like Contacts, Notes, Mail, TextEdit, Dictionary all select a word when you right-click it. It sounds like Firefox may have overridden that behaviour, but the OS does it by default.

exactly, by default, whether online or offline, it's constant, do you know how to change it? i often want to copy something and then just insert it into another piece of writing, but it always selects SOMETHING and then replaces it

 

[Tobilins]

I came across this after updating sonom 14.3
It's just crazy, it's impossible to work
I created my topic with this problem and I'm damn disappointed that there is no solution. This crap highlights everything and everywhere

 

[UncleHauser]

I came across this after updating sonom 14.3
It's just crazy, it's impossible to work
I created my topic with this problem and I'm damn disappointed that there is no solution. This crap highlights everything and everywhere

New Mac user here and I right click to open links in new tabs often and find this very annoying.

 

[deadbeef33]

Made an account just to second this issue. This behavior is absolutely awful.

To answer the questions of the people who keep asking, I will explain exactly when and why this is a problem.

I am trying to copy some text from git. Specifically, I have a line of text that says: `Your branch is up to date with 'origin/my_branch_name'.` I need to copy just the bit that says "my_branch_name". So what I do is carefully highlight "my_branch_name", right click to open the contextual menu, and...... BAM, macos has decided that I actually wanted to highlight 'origin/my_branch_name' instead, so it changes what I've highlighted to include that entire thing, instead of the specific bit of text that I carefully highlighted myself. I can find NO WAY to persist ONLY the text which I have carefully highlighted. MacOS always decides "no, actually you wanted something else" and changes what I've highlighted. So I have no way whatsoever to open the contextual menu just on this piece of text alone.

I am not comfortable using the keyboard shortcut for copy in this context. When I am using a terminal, just to be safe, I never use the keyboard shortcut for "copy", because depending on the context and the terminal you're using, this behavior can sometimes be undefined. For example, if you are ssh'd to a different system, or if you are in telnet, the behavior of the keyboard shortcuts can be different. For this reason, when I want to copy text in a terminal, I ALWAYS right click to open the context menu. But MacOS has decided that this is no longer an option.

This happens in many other circumstances too, outside of the terminal, where I will carefully highlight text, right click to open the contextual menu (because I'm still getting used to Mac keyboard shortcuts), and only too late do I notice that MacOS has decided that I meant to highlight extra stuff.