Not a name, but many people do this to help them focus and read. Having a smallish block of selected text enables easier visual tracking (so less likely to skip/repeat lines). It is more common in the ADHD and dyslexia communities, in my experience.
Can you send a screenshot? I am the creator of a tool [1] that uses color to aid visual focus, so I’m very curious to see what the approach you’re describing looks like.
Would love to connect to hear more about your experience and perspective. If you have a minute, please drop a line: contact at companydomain. Thanks for the pointer!
I do the same, and I think it originated back when I had a mouse with no scroll wheel. Dragging a text selection up and down to the top and bottom edges of the viewport let you scroll up and down by arbitrary distances. I'd call this "selection scrolling?"
The thing I do nowadays rarely involves scrolling, though, so it's probably just "digital fidgeting."
Transitioned from dev to management. Amount of micro-distractions is so high that it's a convenient micro-bookmarking tool. It's also an aid against scroll jank from loading pages / delayed banners / what not. In some cases I also just click page to ensure focus is in there, because of some pages having niché scrolling methods that require click-to-focus before pressing any scrolling hotkeys (up/down, space, page up/down, etc) will work.
Oh man. I stopped reading Medium blogs because they have that inane selection-popup bullshit. I'm not going back but you do have my love for implementing that :)
