Please fix double-click to select passwords in note fields

ferebee

I have lots of notes that include passwords. (It would not be practical to create individual entries for everything.)

Older versions of 1P would let me double-click a password to select it, and even passwords like aaa.bbb-ccc would be selected in their entirety.

1P 8 changed this behavior and now appears to use a different “word-boundary” algorithm intended for plaintext, so a double-click on the example above selects just, for instance, “aaa”. This is very inconvenient, as I have to use the mouse to drag-select the password.

An additional problem with this is that it’s easy to select invisible whitespace at the end of a password. Especially if there is a tab character at the end of a line, it’s possible to drag-select in such a way that just the password characters show the selection color, but the clipboard after copying contains whitespace (even linebreaks). Obviously this wreaks havoc when pasting the password.

Please implement a suitable algorithm to recognize appropriate word boundaries on double-click.

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1Password Version: 8.10.0
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: macOS 13.2.1
Browser:_ Not Provided

andrew.l_1P

Hi @ferebee,

Thanks for surfacing this, I'm happy to share your feedback here with the rest of the team.

In the meantime, I noticed a triple-click in 1Password 8 would highlight the entire paragraph, so you could explore separating phrases you wanted to highlight onto their own lines:

That said, I would still encourage you to utilize the password fields built in to 1Password. I recognize you mentioned this wasn't practical for all your data, but you could start with the passwords you use most. These don't necessarily need to be separate items, you can add additional password fields to any existing item and still have the benefit of that data being obscured and copyable by a single click:

There are still some benefits to using separate items though, since features like Quick Access only look at the default password field of an item.

To help in this process, you can open your existing Secure Note in a separate window so it remains on screen while you edit other entries within 1Password:

Let me know if you give these a try or have any questions. 🙂

ferebee

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your feedback! I understand your suggestions perfectly, but I’ll just reiterate, that’s not what I want to do.

I have about 2500 items in my 1Password, not to mention that I often have vaults open that I share with clients. I have lots of clients (I do IT support for small businesses and individuals) and will often create a note for one client with everything that client wants me to store. And yes, they ask me to store lots of information.

About half of my 1Password items are notes. My notes contain an average of, doing a quick estimate here, 100 words and passwords. I also use a number of other 1Password item types, with abandon!

Yes, I like your product, and I use it a lot!

I don’t want to create, another quick estimate, 50,000 items.

My issue, not being able to double-click on passwords in a reasonable fashion (I copied extraneous whitespace at the end of passwords, as I described, three times just today, I counted), would be less frustrating if things hadn’t worked perfectly before in 1Password 7, and all the other versions I’ve used for many decades, in a Mac-like fashion, where you double-click the thing, and it selects.

I do realize that 1Password is no longer build primarily with Mac-specific technology. It is what it is. But being able to select text is a central function. It’s how I spend, about, another estimate, 10% of my total time with the product. It should work better than just borderline tolerably well.

I really don’t think I’m the only user who selects text.

Thanks!

ag_tommy

@ferebee

I can see that special characters seem to break the word boundaries just as you mentioned. We have a bug report open where using special characters in the search box breaks the search. I can't help but think this is related to that in some form. I'm going to mention this to the team in a new bug report on the specifics you described. I can't make any type of promise but I can say I'll certainly advocate for a change.

ferebee

@ag–tommy

Thanks! I’ve figured out one easily reproducible issue that’s causing a lot of my additional frustration, beyond the inability to just double-click a password stored in a 1Password Note item to select the whole thing, special characters included. To reproduce:

1. In a 1Password Note item, enter “word double.word word”.
2. Double-click on “double”. Given that “.” is (inappropriately) recognized as a word break, “double” is selected.
3. Hold Shift, and click at the right edge of the “d” at the end of the string “double.word”. (Place the caret cursor close to the vertical line that is the rightmost part of the “d” glyph.)

Expected behavior:
By standard text-selection convention, this should select the entire string “double.word”.

Observed behavior:
The space after the string is selected as well, i. e., the text “double.word ” is selected. You have to click far to the left of the right edge of the “d” to avoid selecting the following space character.

This is always incorrect behavior (on the Mac at least) under any circumstances, and is completely unacceptable, if I may say so. Here, it is particularly problematic, as whitespace is almost never part of a password, and in fact the behavior I’m expecting to begin with is that whitespace should be the only delimiter recognized as a word break when double-clicking text inside a 1Password Note.

BTW there is further nonstandard behavior. Shift-clicking anywhere else inside of “word” will select the entire string “double.word” without the trailing whitespace. (Standard Mac behavior is to extend the selection by characters, not by words.) This would actually help to work around the particular issue at hand, but we are not going to learn text UI that violates standard Mac conventions here, and that has become muscle memory after decades, just to work around a bug in 1Password. ;)