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Just let me select text

aartaka.me

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Re: Just let me select text

#511

Post by mc3301 »

jowea wrote: post #496
weinzierl wrote: post #440

Places that prevent selection completely is not something I encounter that often. What I do experience regularly is places where selection is broken or unnecessarily fiddly. On iOS I find it often easier to screenshot and select in the image. Screenshot, select, paste is a much smoother workflow than trying to select what I want three times, failing, selecting too much on one end, not enough on the other, copy, paste…

I remember seeing at least one site where the result of copying is garbled text.

Music lyrics sites used to all do this. You'd copy/paste the lyrics, and every other line was the website name or something.

Maybe because it was easy to scrape the text and make your own lyrics website or something?

I also think that google's song lyrics (on the search page itself) used to be non-selectable. But I jsut tried it, and they are selectable now.

Re: Just let me select text

#512

Post by mc3301 »

kevincox wrote: post #235
jiehong wrote: post #178

It’s especially aggravating in mobiles apps, like on iOS such as: - can’t select app reviews text (for translation for example) - WhatsApp text bubbles don’t let you select text inside at all - WeChat: exact same Overall, it’s also very annoying when apps just don’t give you the standard OS options for a field. Like WhatsApp or WeChat does not give you access to the normal contextual menu at all, so no "translate" fo…

Yeah, all messaging apps seem to have decided that you shouldn't be able to select part of the message. The only option is to copy exactly one message. Not multiple messages, not that one word you want to look up from one message. I don't know why this is standard but it is very annoying.

Line is cool. Long press copies the entire message, but ALSO pops up a little menu with "select text to copy" among other options.

Re: Just let me select text

#513

Post by mc3301 »

rotis wrote: post #414

Reminds me of one of the stupidest hacks I discovered (In my mind). In one of my previous companies we had many similar Lotus Notes databases and one of them didn't allow to copy text from it. You could paste, I'm sure. You could select the text. But not copy. Turns out you could DRAG the selected text to other window. This copied the text over. So being able to highlight a text may mean you can indeed copy it ;)

This is how to "copy" text from locked google sheets, too.

Re: Just let me select text

#514

Post by mc3301 »

CM30 wrote: post #329

Let's not forget the frustrations of an online system disabling the ability to select anything other than 'all' the text in a paragraph/text area/whatever. So many times I've needed simplify the data provided by an embed code or share link for some reason (usually a third party integration or API development), only to have found the site forcefully making me select way more than I ever needed to. It doesn't really ch…

I like when you "select all" and it selects every single word on the entire page, instead of just the obvious section which one would want.

Re: Just let me select text

#516

Post by bashevis »

kilroy123 wrote: post #357
zelphirkalt wrote: post #260

I 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…

I literally selected your comment as I read it. I do the same.

Same. I made a chrome extension years ago to enable this on desktop Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/selectable/jcidlhgd...

There isn't a great workaround for mobile apps though.

Re: Just let me select text

#517

Post by cyanydeez »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #260

I 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…

This would be a good use case fpr a small LLMxOCR to dynically highlight text.

Re: Just let me select text

#518

Post by fletchowns »

1bpp wrote: post #474
fletchowns wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my text highlighting habit started in the late 90s when the prominent N64 website (what was the name of it??) would have text intentionally "hidden" on the page in the same color as the background, so you had to highlight to see it.

You might mean N64.com, which later evolved into IGN64/IGN

Yeah I think that was it!

Re: Just let me select text

#519

Post by crossroadsguy »

cosmojg wrote: post #225

I must admit, one of my favorite recent-ish Android[1] features is that all text is made selectable in the app switcher using on-device OCR. Regardless of the app[2], you can just swipe up and start selecting text. [1] ...at least on the Google Pixel. [2] ...unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for screenshots and similar things.

Blocking screenshots for certain apps has been like "someone drowned in a lake -> block access to the lake".

The only thing it helps in is helping banks close the tickets when you inform them of a bug and they ask for screenshots and you tell them you can't because their app doesn't allow it, so "… closing this ticket since we received no further input from the customer. Please feel free to reply if you need anything else."

They never tell me to take a photo from another app and I never volunteer to do that because if they reply like this I know they are not going to work on the bug.

Re: Just let me select text

#520

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

Hey, things have improved. Once in a while still I find a website that intercepts right click with an alert box: "This website's content is COPYRIGHTED!"

On the other hand, making text unselectable in an app is more annoying. In a browser I can bore through the div soup to find the text element, but in an app it's just a big "fuck you."

Halfway in between is an electron app like Spotify which, as far as I can see, disables text selection.

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