Disable mouse drag to select

Question

I often run into an issue where I will click in a Emacs frame to make it active and accidentally slide my cursor so that it changes from a click to a drag. This means that some text is highlighted which can change behavior of the next commands I run (I am using evil-mode, so this puts me into visual state, but this is applicable outside of evil mode as well).

I don't want to completely disable the mouse, as I find it quite useful I just want to disable selecting text on a drag operation. I tried the following, but it lead to weird behavior (when the pointer leaving frames it will select text and it will still select one character sometimes).

(define-key evil-motion-state-map [down-mouse-1] 'ignore)

Is there a way to accomplish disabling drag to select (in evil specifically or outside)?

Because I have emacs full screen (with multiple monitors) and so there is no title bar or edge :) — Prgrm.celeritas, Feb 08 '19 at 19:54
I find the `down-mouse-1` binding confusing. Perhaps https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/64966/454 helps to clarify things? — phils, Jul 06 '21 at 08:37

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 09 '20 at 06:33

0

If I understand you correctly, you want to set the point on click but not set the region on drag.

You can enable this behaviour globally with:

(progn
  (global-set-key [mouse-1] 'mouse-set-point)
  (global-unset-key [down-mouse-1])
  (global-unset-key [drag-mouse-1]))

answered Oct 09 '20 at 06:33

halloleo

1,215
9
23

Why unbind `down-mouse-1`? – phils Jul 06 '21 at 08:36

Disable mouse drag to select

1 Answers1