On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 23:50:34 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 9/29/2015 1:58 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
There have certainly been times where I've wanted to copy text
that was not
selectable for some reason (or selectable but not copyable),
but it sounds like
you have a much higher expectation of text selectability than
I do.
Cases that frustrate me:
1. In filing a bug report, I need to input the version number.
For Internet Explorer, I bring up the "About Internet Explorer"
dialog box. The version is (I kid you not) a 55 character
string of random digits and letters. I want to cut&paste this.
Not possible.
2. I get a dialog box popping up with an error message in it. I
want to google the error message. Have to retype it.
3. Thunderbird Mail lets me import/export the address book. But
not account settings. So I want to select and copy the account
settings dialog box. Nope.
Really, what's the case for not supporting this? Am I really a
unique snowflake?
No, you're alone, though it's not something that I think about
often. I think that most of us run into this sort of problem from
time to time (e.g. for some reason, the VPN client that I use for
work won't let you copy-paste the IP address that you're
connected to, so you have to read it and type it out by hand
every time that you need to give it to someone, which is just
silly). But there are aspects of GUIs where I don't think that
it's really reasonable to expect to be able to copy the text,
because it would interfere with how the GUI works (e.g. the text
on a button). So, I _expect_ there to be times when I can't copy
a piece text from a GUI.
However, that being said, I don't think that there's any question
that more text should be selectable and copyable than is. It
looks like KDE made is that you can select the text in their
about boxes. I have no idea why Microsoft didn't. And it's just
plain embarrassing that Microsoft wouldn't let you copy error
messages from error dialogs. But I think that it mostly comes
down to the folks who put GUIs together not thinking about this
sort of thing. It really isn't related to the primary
functionality of an application, so it's easy to forget. And in
many cases, I expect that it comes down to exactly what kind of
GUI widget was used to display the text, and if the toolkit in
question wasn't designed with this in mind, then everyone using
it is going to end up with unselectable and uncopyable text in
their GUIs - which just goes to show, I suppose, that if the GUI
toolkit folks get it right, then a lot of programs will, and I
guess that Win32 or MFC or whatever C# thing Microsoft and many
other Windows shops use for many of their GUIs don't do it right.
- Jonathan M Davis
