Correction: make that "dialog" instead of "menu".

I often find that when I select text in some Linux GUI applications that I need to select it twice. I'll highlight a filename in a dialog with the intent of overwriting it to, say, rename it, and after highlighting it, the highlighting disappears. I cannot recall a time when the highlighting disappeared after re-highlighting and forcing one to do it a third time.

Examples:

* Copying and pasting some text from "gedit" into LibreOffice and each and every chunk of text had to be highlighted twice before I could copy it to the clipboard.

* In file manager dialogs where you create a new folder/subdirectory and the dialog fills in the field with something like "New folder name". You highlight it with the intention of overwriting that default text but, while you're in the process of trying to overwrite the highlighted text, the highlighting disappears. If you're not watchful, you'll end up with a new subdirectory named "New folder namemyapp_data" (or something like that).

Has anyone else encountered this? I can't say that this is specific to GTK-based applications. I seem to remember this used to hit me in Dolphin as well when I was still using it. I'm nearly always using KDE when I see this happening; I can't recall if it's something happening on other window managers.

Ideas?

TIA...

Are you using a trackpad? If so, it may be ultra sensitive and interpreting your highlighting swipe or finger removal as a click. You could test this to an extent by configuring the trackpad not to react to anything but single finger swipes (assuming that the trackpad has a separate section for clicks and right-clicks).

Any clipboard utilities installed?
Create a new user and login as them and check from there.

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I remember this happening a lot on an old IBM laptop when I was using the red button keyboard mouse pointer before I learned how to disable the touchpad and I stopped the cases where my wrist would touch the trackpad and move the cursor across the screen unexpectedly. In this case, though, I mainly see this on my desktop system when using a Kensington Smart Mouse (trackball). It's really difficult to accidentally double click on this device.

It doesn't occur everywhere. For example, I can double click on text in this post and is stays selected. My experience is that it happens in applications like file managers and some other utilities that come with a desktop manager. I just fired up Thunar, double clicked on my home directory and it unselected after about a half second. Double clicking a second time and this doesn't happen. If I click and drag to select a portion of my home directory, same thing. Click and drag a second time--selecting the exact same portion of my home directory--and it stays selected. If, on the other hand, I click and drag to highlight that same portion of the directory and include a single additional character... it unselects within that half second interval. Thunar's not the only application where this happens. I think I mentioned that it occurred in Dolphin as well. Gedit does it and, in this case, it's not isolated to dialog box fields; trying to manipulate text in the body of the file being edited is maddenly difficult because of this unselection behavior. Chrome hasn't exhibited this behavior and neither does the GIMP so it's not consistent what type of application will have this happen... which is partly why it's annoying.

I'm thinking some library bug but how on earth would you narrow this down?

Just the Parcellite "clipboard manager" that seems to be installed by default when you create your KDE/Plasma desktop. I quit that and found that the problem within Thunar is fixed. Gedit, too, and likely others. I can't recall that I ever used that application for anything before; it was just up there in the panel... waiting to cause problems, I guess.

Good catch. Thanks. Now I'm off to disable it on other systems.

I'm going to close this one out as "Solved".

Glad it worked out.