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Comment by lovasoa | Hacker News Reader

Dashes in API keys are really annoying. Double-clicking doesn’t select the full key, which just adds extra hassle. It would be much better if they used a continuous string without any separators. Makes copying and pasting way easier, and doesn't affect security at all.

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They realized that and were pleased with themselves.

> The dashes do remove easy double-click copying, but we think this a fine trade off for readability. We don't want users copying and pasting them everywhere, in fact we want them to be handled with care. Ideally, users copy each key exactly once - when they generate the key from our dashboard - so we added a copy button to our UI to solve that case

Don't even think about copying/pasting that key, you rube!

This statement makes me never want to use their product.

I agree. They seem to focus on completely useless stuff that actively makes it worse to use.

Not only that, they are making the biggest mistake a company can do by telling their customers that what they are doing is wrong and that the company knows better than they do.

Double click and drag is your friend.

Side note: this seems to work differently on Mac. I had to wait a little bit before the drag function would drag and not change the selection.

I don't experience this on any of my devices! It's instantaneous.

you're my hero today

Happy to help. Check out triple click as well. And maybe 4???

Whenever I have created API keys for a product, this is the #1 feature I want: easy copy-pasteability. Just letters and numbers, no special characters that break double-click-selecting the key.

This is the only annoyance with UUIDs, I won't be typing it because its 5 characters shorter. Separators are nice because I can try to visually compare Ids, but it needs to be a visual separator that won't break a `word`/`WORD` (whatever boundary that is by default on most terminals and browsers) select by double clicking.

I want to just double click and copy, dragging is annoying.

I really don't care about the aesthetics of a string but this is 100% my issue when interacting with UUIDs.

or make it optional and/or allow other symbols such as _

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