Don't touch my clipboard • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#51

Post by stefco_ » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:10 AM UTC

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like:

    “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)”

    Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books.

When you only copied:

    ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)

Note that the quotes around your actual selection aren't even the ASCII quote character; you get horrid unicode quotes that are easy to miss if you're just trying to run a bit of code in your REPL. This isn't even a DRM ebook, so it's not like Apple is being compelled by contract to insert a citation. It's awful, user-hostile behavior that removes one of the main advantages of digital-vs-hardcopy coding books (copy/paste), and AFAIK there's no config that lets you disable it.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#52

Post by belltaco » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:12 AM UTC

stefco_ wrote: post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

Wonder if an author will rename themself sudo rm -rf / with the proper escape codes.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#53

Post by sundvor » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:13 AM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #52

stefco_ wrote: post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

Wonder if an author will rename themself sudo rm -rf / with the proper escape codes.

Bobby wants his tables back!

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#54

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

slimsag wrote: post #17

Really, the web just gets more and more vile towards users. Sure, highly technical folk are capable of working around this all -- but the vast majority of people do not have a browser that is _working for them_: - You have little to no control over what content you are seeing. Instead, it is chosen for you. - A large number of videos (not even including movies and shows) are geographically blocked. You cannot access…

[deleted]

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#55

Post by SanchoPanda » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:19 AM UTC

codazoda wrote: post #45

thought_alarm wrote: post #35

I've been using a simple Javascript whitelist/blocker for the last 4 years or so (a dead-simple Safari content blocker for iOS and Mac I wrote myself; syncs over iCloud just to give me something to do) and I honestly don't know how anyone can stand the wide-open web without something similar. Using the web with free Javascript privileges is an utterly appalling experience. I can't stand it for more than 5 seconds.

I recently switched back to Chrome on mobile because I NEED the ability to blacklist JavaScript from abusive sites. Hacker News links, in particular, are infuriating without it. I haven't found a way to do this in any of the Firefox versions available for Android. My block list is mostly well known news sites.

Ublock origin works on mobile, and you can reuse your settings from desktop.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#56

Post by SanchoPanda » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

brobot182 wrote: post #2

Is there a chrome plugin that prevents this?

May I ask how many plugins you run at any time on average?

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#57

Post by nneonneo » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:23 AM UTC

stefco_ wrote: post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

It also messes with dictionary lookup! It adds this nonsense if you select more than two Chinese characters, and so it makes it really hard to look up four-character Chinese idioms in my dictionary (which are, inexplicably, frequently missing from the built-in “lookup” dictionary).

Apple Books is so close to being a nice reading interface, but there are so many stupid little bugs. Highlighting is another horrid little bug that can easily wipe out a full chapter’s worth of highlights with one tap...

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#58

Post by hashkb » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:26 AM UTC

smichel17 wrote: post #14

The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it. Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.

> I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it

Perhaps in a rich text editor I want to copy as plain text; or perhaps I want to make a Markdown editor that you can select+copy the Markdown but then paste HTML. Just brainstorming.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#59

Post by analog31 » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:26 AM UTC

brobot182 wrote: post #2

Is there a chrome plugin that prevents this?

In lieu of a plugin, I always paste into a plain text editor and copy the stuff I actually want from there. I've always done this, not because of dark-patterny stuff, but just fonts and having bad aim with my cursor when I copy.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#60

Post by eitland » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

This is bad UX if nothing else.

For an example of what I think wad good UX: In Windows, it used to be that pasting into a text editor would give you the original text while pasting into OneNote would magically give you the text with a link back to the source below.

I used to love that and for what I know it still works, I just don't use Windows and OneNote that much anymore.