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Comment by someguy101010 | Hacker News Reader

> This commmand allows you to convert your shell output into an image as this makes it much easier than taking a screenshot of your shell if you want to share your output with someone.

Why is this becoming a more common practice? There is nothing more annoying than a picture of a block of text that I can't copy, quote, or modify and send back to someone.

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> There is nothing more annoying than a picture of a block of text

Oh, but there is: Videos of bug reports where a person first has to explain that they have found a bug, and they will try to reproduce it now, and if you're still watching after 3 minutes you might see the important 5 seconds of the video, that could have been expressed in a few well-written sentences!

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with.

People intuitively can ‘show’ you what’s wrong but most non-developers will have a hard time phrasing it.

“I press the button and nothing happens” is representative of written bug reports I’ve seen. What button? What’s supposed to happen? What page are you on? How can I reproduce this?

Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct.

> Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct.

As long as we retain those opening, over-amplified metal riffs. Jump scares are why I watch tech vids.

That can depend on what it's a picture of. A picture of a block of text is usually not as good as the text as text.

> Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce.

Oh yeah, totally, my experience has been that video bug reports are literally a thousand times better than text bug reports. I've worked in console game dev where we even required reproducer videos because they're so much better at showing the context of what happened. Often the text description was wrong and/or wildly incomplete and/or full of assumptions the user made about how things work or what's going on, and the video would demonstrate the issue and allow me to not have to engage in a lengthy back-and-forth conversation trying to understand the situation.

> “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with.

I do too, but until now, I had never read that the other way around, that a picture might cost a thousand words. ;)

My favorite version of this trope is a video of a computer screen taken from a poorly held phone. Bonus points if the video is in portrait, cropping off important bits of text.

Sure, not everyone's comfortable with a computer, and they think they're clever with a solution. I still get annoyed when I get one of these videos.

Don't forget that the image will also be in HEVC format and will be >5MB.

There was a vendor we had, they used the free version of a popular screen recorder for ALL their support tasks.

Put in a ticket asking how to do something? They sent you a link to a very slow-moving screencast of going in and turning an option on/off or configuring a setting. No audio!

Their knowledge base articles were just a collection of links to screen recordings! It was so annoying.

Guess what happened when that company shut the free version of their app down...

But which well-written sentences?

If you do a minimum of testing, bugs often depend on context. For example, in case of a UI bug, maybe the user zoomed in, maybe he is using a non-default font, maybe he is using a different locale, maybe he did some action without realizing it (ex: scrolling, resizing the window), maybe the time is incorrect, etc...

"I click that button and it crashed" isn't going to help you there, you know it doesn't crash, you use that button all the time...

If it is as straightforward as it looks, watching that 3 minute video is your punishment for not testing. Yes, I know, I don't test either, but don't blame the reporter for it.

I agree that a video can provide more context than text does. However, most videos I have received as bug reports in the past failed to do that. I just saw the user doing random stuff leading to random events. I'd say that often the most important thing to have is actually not a well-written bug report or a well-made video, but rather having access to the user's settings file and logs (if that exists for the application), as they often contain the explanation of why you don't see what the user sees.

I love video reports, even bad videos since you can just ask for clarification and usually they point out what they were trying to show and you get the context from the video.

I like it so much that I've considered implementing always-on screen recording in our QA debug builds.

Sounds like you work at H1 :)

My personal theory is that fewer and fewer people spend time on actual general computing devices. When confined to straitjackets like phones and tablets, people resort to the one functionality that is easy to reach for, namely screenshots. I'm guessing the habit spreads?

Just look at the amount of garbage "here's my code as a screenshot, what's wrong?" questions Stack Overflow has to remove each and every single day.

I remember reading a few years ago from a teacher that was teaching a class that involved using the school computers, and a good amount of the kids seemingly didn't comprehend how to use a desktop OS with a windowing system. I can't remember the specifics but they seemed to only use it within the constraints of what they were used to from using smartphones and iPads. Like only using 1 app at a time in fullscreen, and didn't really understand dragging and dropping between different windows.

As a tiling WM user, I virtually never drag & drop between windows. And 98% of time I have maximized browser / editor / terminal.

It's faster to do "screenshot area to paste buffer" then paste it than to select the text you want (text selection requires more precision than just snagging a zone of the screen) and fiddle with text formatting on the receiving program (Slack, email, whatever). I do it all the time when I just want to show someone something short, and don't expect them to need to copy it. Bonus: precisely the same workflow works for non-text.

Maybe just me. I tried the command:

  ps aux | convert label:@- process.png

And got an image that was useless. Nothing readable.

Oh. Now I know what kind of one-liners he meant.

Did you zoom in enough? On my system, it produces an image with pixel width of 11000 and file size of 3 MB, so the text appears too small when the default image viewer shows it at 12% zoom in order to make it fit within the available display size. Zooming in to show it at 100% zoom makes the text readable.

While this command works fine and is readable too at 100% zoom, I wonder why one would do this. Isn't copy-pasting the text output of 'ps aux' more convenient than creating a large image out of it that is not easy to read, filter, etc.?

pretty sure it just puts the image of all the lines from the screen on top of each other, so it's pretty useless for me too. I've been trying to get this to work so I can automate screen grabs that are required for some audits we do.

I had better luck with the netpbm tools:

ps aux | pbmtext | pnmtopng > process.png

100% agree but I think the motivation is not to purposefully be inaccessible but rather to get aesthetically pleasing stylings like code highlighting, font choice, editor theme, etc. People will always choose the pretty solution over the accessible one, unless forced to do otherwise. So, we need to make it easier (easier than screenshotting actually) to share code over text and yet keep all those sick styles you want. Just look at Medium for what NOT to do. Never have I seen a more hostile forum for code sharing. Look at GitHub for a decent example. There really isn’t a good example I’m aware of. Even highlight.js I have trouble getting my code to “scroll overflow” rather than wrap (which for code can be more problematic than it is for regular writing).

Someone should write a browser plugin that OCRs the text in an image and makes it selectable.

There are a few of those extensions around. This is a popular one https://projectnaptha.com/ It is kinda like magic if you ask me.

This is built into Android 11. Just go into the app switcher and you can select text from screenshots or anywhere else.

Here you go: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-vision/nblmo...

TextSniper[0] is great on macOS, and is part of Setapp now. I also wrote my own script that hooks into Google cloud vision API for the really tough stuff. I use this many, many times a day. It's changed my life - never realized what a problem this was and how much time could be saved by grabbing bits of previously un-copyable text from stubborn places.

[0] https://textsniper.app

It's better for places where you can't control text wrapping or text is limited. Twitter is the main one.

The only reason to post an image instead of a pastebin is for engagement. I understand the engagement practices we are subject to on attention marketplaces like twitter, but is it that hard to provide a supplemental pastebin link?

Some locations and people have sites like pastebin blocked, but image hosting allowed. Also in case of say technical blog posts, a combination of certain text characters might trigger a false positive for malware on your site. You don't get that problem with images.

It's not engagement. It's usability. Way better having the image in context than having an external link to a text written with fixed width font. Obviously you should ALSO provide the link to the text in the tweet so one can easily copypaste (if interested in the code/text after seeing the image preview)

Here is how I like to share logs/outputs these days:

  ps aux | nc termbin.com 9999

unless it's gonna hug-of-death them, we should promote termbin and similar hosts

It’s convenient to share in a Slack (and similar) channel. At least I do it all the time. Also, convenient to attach in an RCA doc that’s shared with higher ups who don’t have time to play around with metrics dashboard.

We're required to provide screen shot images for system audits. Since somehow those are harder to manipulate (much laughter).

And... that command doesn't work for me when I'm using ssh to access my servers or using x2go.

It's pretty handy for gifs where you actually see the problem getting reproduced. But for the rest I agree it is getting rather annoying. And I honestly don't know why tech-savvy people who work on software themselves would do it. It is slower and less convenient.

For others it's pretty clear though: taking a smartphone picture and emailing it around is probably always faster than other means. Plus I'm pretty sure less tech-savy people simply have no idea Ctrl-C works nearly everywhere, including shells and dialog boxes.

You cannot tweet a piece of formatted text. You can sort quote it in Facebook, but any formatting like color will be lost, and color is often important in terminal output.

So, sadly, the picture is made exactly with the purpose of proper quoting, unfortunately losing the textual content :(

I do this all the time for validation effort etc. where they need an artifact.

I dunno, but google photos does an amazing job of taking a picture and then just allowing you to select text right out of it. Even text with a weird font (possible handwriting?). Kinda blows my mind.

> There is nothing more annoying than a picture of a block of text that I can't copy, quote, or modify and send back to someone.

Don't forget search.

Too many StackOverflow posts start with a screenshot of yum errors or mysql logs.

Ugh.

I imagine that Google can search for text inside images (?)

Of course it can. Heck, Evernote did 10 years ago.

It definitely has some utility especially design/layout problems but if you need to type the same thing to reproduce it, it's a pain.

friction

sharing a snapshot is guaranteed to be easy to do in two clicks

sharing text is less so, selection is more work, finding a host is more work

Passive aggressiveness.

Passive aggression ;)

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