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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

Sure, I agree. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make though.

Because - and _ break text selection in existing systems you do not have control over, if you use those characters your ids will become harder to select.

Someone already made this point, and once again, "break" is completely undefined. It is not at all impossible or even difficult to select text with - or _, so what's "broken" exactly? At worst it takes one extra step to extend the default selection. These are such weird objections.

I work across multiple machines with different pointing devices (regular mouse, vertical mouse, touchpad), and have no issues double clicking to select a word. Dragging from the start of a word to the end can sometimes take multiple tries. I may miss the first letter. I may drag too far. The vertical mouse isn't great at holding a selection. It's not a huge deal, but it's an annoyance that I don't run into working with Stripe IDs.

The entire point of making this form of ID is to make it a friendly user experience, to create an ID that can easily be communicated by a person over the phone to another phone, to make an ID that is easy to click, double-click, tap (with fingers on a touch surface), double-tap, hold-and-select and tap to 'copy', and so on.

The _ and - symbols make this difficult in the edge cases of all of the above. Do you call it dash, or underscore? Line? Hyphen? Binder-strich?

&etc.

I would have gone with adding the @ and ~ symbols, those are at least parsable in human form as well .. ".. email symbol and squiggly thing .. "

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