On 9/29/2015 6:51 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 23:50:34 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
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.
I should be able to copy the button text by starting the stroke from outside the
button and crossing over it.
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.
Microsoft should:
1. fix it so it is the default behavior.
2. list it in their guidelines for how dialog boxes should work.
