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Real-world example I use nearly daily: Selecting the nav header that's the ticket number in our ticketing system. I copy-paste the number elsewhere. Of course
by Hobadee 1y ago
Real-world example I use nearly daily: Selecting the nav header that's the ticket number in our ticketing system. I copy-paste the number elsewhere.
Of course there are many other bad design decisions that go into requiring me to do this, but it's still a real example of why all text should be selectable.
- n8m8 1y agoI almost always copy this by double clicking after the `/` in the URL
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoEnter, stage left, ServiceNow hell urls
- grues-dinner 1y agoGitlab has killed this with their slide in issues. If you have an issue open, and you copy the address, it's just a huge unique ID context thing. So you have to scroll to the top and use the little copy link button at the top of the page.
- tetromino_ 1y agoThen all those nav headers need to have a little button on the side to open a floating div with copy-pasteable content. Or, if needed - different versions of copy-pasteable content (as a command line for copy-pasting into the terminal, json, etc.) This is a standard UI convention used by all internal dev tools at my current company.
- lupire 1y agoOh don't worry, it's a tooltip, so you can see it, but not copy it.
- Anon1096 1y agoSomething I absolutely loved while working at Meta was that basically every internal system has some kind of ticket ID, and more importantly, wherever it's displayed near the top of the page you very likely can click-to-copy it. And the click-to-copy gives you a rich version of the ticket ID that you could paste into Google Docs and have the link to the ticket page embedded already. Really small feature that improved the life of engineers a lot considering how much you're copy/pasting IDs around. It's the type of UX care that I expect ServiceNow type third party systems will never have.
- kuekacang 1y agoRecently I've been considering simple click-to-copy button is a bad ux since it can destroy one's clipboard (granted, I'm not using clipboard manager). This might be mitigated with a confirmation before actually replacing the clipboard, but I haven't encountered such implementation. Maybe due to ctc more often appear in tech-related websites.
- mintplant 1y agoI highly recommend getting a clipboard manager! They keep a (usually configurable) history of your most recent clipboard items and allow switching the active selection between them.
- kuekacang 1y agoSurely. First time I used clipboard management was long time ago somewhen in windows xp era. But growing older make me not really incentivized on trying myself to relearn clipboard history gestures. I might do that someday though. The difference is now I know git and text editor with hot-save support; with mostly textual clipboard, the texts usually just land in either git/editor.
- whstl 1y agoSo far the alternatives to capricious developer choices are: - Draw Chinese characters into a translator - Just have every website support every language ever - Install cliboard manager software to handle the fact you don’t always want to copy Gotta love HN.
- lupire 1y agoMy company has dedicated years of engineering time to add custom "copy" buttons next to text that they spent months to make non-selectable.
- mrandish 1y ago> text that they spent months to make non-selectable. Just curious, what was the original reason(s) to make the text non-selectable.
- whstl 1y agoThat's why we don't have flying cars.
- mc3301 1y agoI chuckled. I reflected on the hours having done metaphorically similar in developing apps.