Select (portions of) link text without clicking or dragging the link

[sfink]

I often have a problem where I want to cut & paste link text. But if I click and drag, it tries to drag the whole link (and dropping it into eg a terminal will paste the URL, so I can't even edit it down). That's fine for default behavior, but I'd really like an easy way to disable the linkiness.

Ctrl-drag and shift-drag are already used. I will suggest Ctrl-shift-drag. For a bonus, while ctrl-shift is pressed it should unstyle all links on the page, or otherwise indicate that things are no longer clickable.

In case it's unclear: if I have the HTML <a href="https://example.com">some juicy text</a>, I want a way to select the word "juicy" with my mouse rather than starting to drag the link.

Right now, I try to find a place to start dragging that is past the link, then drag back to select starting at the beginning of the substring I care about. This is very error-prone and difficult, especially when there is another link right after the first. (Also, it may include a suffix I don't want.)

Perhaps there's an obvious workaround that I don't know about?

[sfink]

Ah. It looks like holding Alt works—if you haven't bound Alt-drag to move a window via your window manager, as I have.

Apparently Ctrl-Alt-drag also works. But in addition to selecting the text, it also follows the link (opening it in a new tag because of the Ctrl.) Or it selects everything in the page up to that point, or after that point, I'm not sure what's going on.

[Anonymous]

I use Copy Link Text as a workaround.