I have never seen a "native" toolkit let you select arbitrary text, They should, I think it is the better interface paradigm. but the web is a distinct outlier here.
Just let me select text
311–320 of 621 posts
Re: Just let me select text
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The third-pound burger flopped because consumers failed to understand that one third is bigger than one fourth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger#Marketing_f...
Should have promoted a quarter-plus-twelfth burger! That's about 37%!
Why complicate it: just advertise a fifth
Re: Just let me select text
#313> title
> 9 words in: text in a .png
Re: Just let me select text
#314I get a kick out of it when a product manager comes suggesting we diable text selection. "oh, you want to disable the single most usable and powerful interoperability feature in our product?" "Yeah. Do we really want people leaving our app with their data?" By leaving, do you mean kicking it off the phone or switching to another app and getting something done? "Oh, yeah, they are just getting something done. But not…
I can't even check out any time I like because of pop-up notifications :-(
Re: Just let me select text
#315As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text. Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions). But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should , prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back a…
100% disagree. Not everyone is fluent in every language, and not every website works perfectly with the browser's translator. There will be situations where people will want to translate that ONE word that is actually in a button or tab, and isn't selectable because someone thought they knew better.
This sounds perhaps a bit rude but it isnt possible to optimize for every possible use case someone somewhere may have. At the end of the day, a line has to be drawn.
Re: Just let me select text
#316One of the biggest wins in my life that Emacs has granted me is the principle of never sacrificing plain text liberties. I could've probably achieved similar results using other tools, but the way Emacs puts you into that mindset is just on another level of awesome.
Today, I can extract text from any tab in my browser to appear in an Emacs buffer. And it specifically "extracts" the text, it's not operating on the URL - meaning that I don't have to deal with auth, cookies, and other things, it just grabs the .outerHTML of an already rendered page - takes me not even a second. I can do whatever I want with that text - read it with far better readability features, feed it to an LLM, export into formats, grab some parts for my notes, etc.
I can extract transcript from a YT video URL with a press of a key.
Heck, I can even extract text from an image in my clipboard. That's what I do almost every day. My colleague would be showing me stuff through Zoom, I'd run Flameshot to grab a specific portion of the screen, and then run my elisp function - it OCRs the image and puts the results into a buffer.
My advice to you folks: do not ever surrender to the status quo; keep the hacker's mindset; hack your way around computers. You have a finite amount of attention tokens, do not waste them getting angry at the upsetting design of web pages; extract what you need like a boss and move on.
Re: Just let me select text
#317I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes i…
The modern web has been dissuading me of this habit. I get unreasonably angry when I select some text, only for an engagement pop up to appear, demanding that my selected text be shared with the world via social media. No, how I interact with the page is a private affair.
Re: Just let me select text
#318And then I run into "I don't want to select text" when I'm editing an image that has text/numbers in it. I'm just trying to highlight something or mark the document up.
Re: Just let me select text
#319[dead]
Re: Just let me select text
#320On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.
> activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen
=>
> activates Google Assistant that can copy a bunch of your personal data for eternal storage with Alphabet, building your personal profile there - with your permission, instead of them having to find some kind of excuse to obtain it
There, I fixed that for you.