[topspin]

Copying anything other than the characters/code points/whatever by default is a misfeature. Should it be possible to copy formatting? Yes, of course, in those rare, specialized cases when it's useful and likely to work in a sane manner. Otherwise it's a bad idea.

I wish I could speak with the people behind text selection in Microsoft Word and other applications. The selection automatically expands to include additional characters, usually whitespace characters although other junk gets pulled in as well, and is a frustration. The behavior seems incoherent; grabbing extra characters for unfathomable reasons.

When the user expends effort to precisely select something this should be respected, not interpreted as an opportunity to apply whatever heuristic gymnastics someone, somewhere for some reason thought was a good idea.