There Is No Universal De-Select-All Idiom

By David Buchanan, 6^th December 2024

Have you ever accidentally selected part of a document, or webpage?

You can even press Ctrl+A to deliberately select all. But there's no way to "undo" that selection.

Individual applications might have workarounds, or even dedicated shortuts, but there is no universal idiom to undo a selection. At least, not as universal as something like Ctrl+A.

The most universal approach, in my experience, is to click some non-important part of the page. It's not always obvious which click targets are unimportant, though.

That's it, that's the whole blog post.