On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 03:33:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/28/2015 6:42 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 23:44:55 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 9/28/2015 2:41 PM, rumbu wrote:
>>>> Pressing Ctrl-C in any *standard* dialog will copy the text to clipboard since
>>>> Windows 2000, even captions and buttons.
>>>
>>> Nope. Doesn't work in the Environment Variables dialog box. Doesn't work in
>>> the Thunderbird about box. Doesn't work in the Notepad about box. Doesn't work
>>> in the IE about box. Or any of the IE dialog boxes I tried, like Internet
>>> Options.
>>>
>>> I haven't found ANY where it works.
>>
>> Hmmm. I'm don't know what you're doing differently from the rest of us.
>> Certainly, the text in about boxes isn't usually selectable, but aren't we
>> specifically talking about the dialog for editing environment variables here? If
>> I open the environment variable dialog, select Path, and click on the edit
>> button,
>
> Try selecting any text in the dialog box before opening another one with the edit button. Or try any of the ones I mentioned.

Well, I would have thought that it was clearly designed with the idea that you'd click on the edit button to edit it. And you can copy and paste the data from the edit dialog. So, not being able to edit the fields in the first dialog really isn't a big deal IMHO, though what they give you with the edit dialog really isn't any better than simply being able to edit it in the initial dialog. So, in that sense, maybe they should have just made it editable in the first dialog rather than having to open one specifically to edit it, though it would be far better to actually make the edit dialog sane rather than just a simple text box. Fortunately though, it sounds like the edit dialog is finally becoming sane with Windows 10.

> > And I can now edit that text and copy it back into the edit
> field for the Path variable, which is stupid to have to do but is a lot saner than editing the text in the edit box directly.
>
> Surely a dialog box stinks if you have to paste its contents into an editor to edit it.

Well, of course, it sucks. Having the PATH be edited via a single text field isn't even vaguely user friendly. Copy-pasting to edit it just a way to make it slightly more sane. What it really needs is to be revamped in a manner similar to what they've apparently finally done with Windows 10.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 9/28/2015 11:16 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Well, I would have thought that it was clearly designed with the idea that you'd
> click on the edit button to edit it. And you can copy and paste the data from
> the edit dialog.

I should be able to copy any text on the screen.

On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 23:44:55 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/28/2015 2:41 PM, rumbu wrote:
>> Pressing Ctrl-C in any *standard* dialog will copy the text to clipboard since
>> Windows 2000, even captions and buttons.
>
> Nope. Doesn't work in the Environment Variables dialog box. Doesn't work in the Thunderbird about box. Doesn't work in the Notepad about box. Doesn't work in the IE about box. Or any of the IE dialog boxes I tried, like Internet Options.
>
> I haven't found ANY where it works.

That applies to error messages that use standard windows message box:
> This really blows when you've got a message window with an error message in it, and you cannot copy it to google it.

On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 07:29:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 9/28/2015 11:16 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Well, I would have thought that it was clearly designed with the idea that you'd
>> click on the edit button to edit it. And you can copy and paste the data from
>> the edit dialog.
>
> I should be able to copy any text on the screen.

Well, I don't know of any operating system where that's possible. For instance, clicking on the title bar and dragging the mouse is going to result in the window being dragged in every desktop environment that I know of, not select the text on it, and it would never work for the text on a button to be selectable, since any attempt to select it would press the button. Maybe more of the text in GUIs should be copyable than is, but that's pretty clearly not generally a goal of GUI designers or of how GUI toolkits are designed.

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.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 19:44:11 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> This really blows when you've got a message window with an error message in it, and you cannot copy it to google it. You cannot copy the "About" dialog box text, either, so you have to painfully type in the version/build number when filing a bug report.

AFAIK, bugzilla supports simple links that create a bug report with prefilled information like program version, so a better way is to provide such link in the program interface similar to bugreporting scripts in linux that gather all relevant system information as an attachment.

On 09/28/2015 03:44 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> The dialog box itself is not an edit box, and copy simply does not work.
> (Just tried it again.) You cannot copy ANY text from it, even the
> highlighted text.
>
> This really blows when you've got a message window with an error message
> in it, and you cannot copy it to google it. You cannot copy the "About"
> dialog box text, either, so you have to painfully type in the
> version/build number when filing a bug report.
>
> Unbelievable.
>

That's one of the many reasons I absolutely despise the modern crop of mobile OSes. (As opposed to PalmOS which worked REALLY damn well, at least aside from the lack of WiFi which wouldn't have been realistic in those days anyway. VERY productive and speedy interface. Puts the modern smartphones completely to shame.)

On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 21:41:27 UTC, rumbu wrote:

>
> Dear Walter,
>
> Pressing Ctrl-C in any *standard* dialog will copy the text to clipboard since Windows 2000, even captions and buttons.

No, standard label controls still don't let you select and copy the text. And that sucks.

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?

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.

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