On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 04:50:37PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 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?
Nope, you're just too smart to use a GUI. ;-) Issues like these were part of what convinced me that the so-called desktop metaphor was bunk and that the current infatuation with GUIs is a case of emperor's clothes, and drove me to embrace the *nix shell. Editing configuration files in a text editor is far more productive than trying to fight with a GUI designed for dummies, especially when you need to do something that the GUI designers did not anticipate. A particular annoyance recently that almost drove me to tear out my hair was also a case of non-resizeable dialogs in Windows (I have the misfortune of needing to use my wife's Windows laptop from time to time). Obviously, that dialog was designed with the (shaky!) assumption that (1) users do not change the default font size, which may cause the chosen design size of the dialog to be far too small to display all pertinent information, (2) filenames may be far longer than anticipated, thereby not fitting into the (IMO far too small) dialog size, (3) the user is too dumb to know how to use a window resizing function in a dialog box (or more likely, the programmer was too lazy to implement such a feature), and (4) it shouldn't matter if part of the information is cut off from view (with no option of getting at it even if you wanted to!) because most users don't care about that level of information anyway, so one could get away with just a perfunctory display of partial information and let the power users suffer for choosing to use something not designed for them in the first place. Nevermind the fact that supposedly "irrelevant" information is highly pertinent when you're dealing with filenames that differ in their last few characters (e.g., "veryLongFilename-01" vs. "veryLongFilename-02", when you're trying to examine a series of files in sequence). But nooo, that only means the user is too smart to be part of our target audience, so too bad for him. Sigh. T -- Let's eat some disquits while we format the biskettes.
