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Comment by Hobadee | Hacker News Reader

Real-world example I use nearly daily: Selecting the nav header that's the ticket number in our ticketing system. I copy-paste the number elsewhere.

Of course there are many other bad design decisions that go into requiring me to do this, but it's still a real example of why all text should be selectable.

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Something I absolutely loved while working at Meta was that basically every internal system has some kind of ticket ID, and more importantly, wherever it's displayed near the top of the page you very likely can click-to-copy it. And the click-to-copy gives you a rich version of the ticket ID that you could paste into Google Docs and have the link to the ticket page embedded already. Really small feature that improved the life of engineers a lot considering how much you're copy/pasting IDs around. It's the type of UX care that I expect ServiceNow type third party systems will never have.

Recently I've been considering simple click-to-copy button is a bad ux since it can destroy one's clipboard (granted, I'm not using clipboard manager). This might be mitigated with a confirmation before actually replacing the clipboard, but I haven't encountered such implementation. Maybe due to ctc more often appear in tech-related websites.

Instead of click-to-copy, you could do click-to-highlight, so that "right-click > Copy" highlights the text on right-click if it's not initially selected. There is some subtlety in the logic, because it shouldn't interfere when the user manually selects a substring.

For a demo of click-to-highlight, install IPvFoo and use your mouse in the popup window. See the 'selectWholeAddress' function in https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/blob/master/src/popup.j...

I'm aware of that gesture, but I think it shows the point that it requires extra intention from the user to do select+copy on an input-looking field with copy button attached, instead of being part if the default ctc button experience.

Not that I am searching, but I wonder if there's already tog/nielson/other ux research on this specific interaction.

More OSs should adopt X11 paste from the primary selection. It can safely coexist with a regular clipboard.

I highly recommend getting a clipboard manager! They keep a (usually configurable) history of your most recent clipboard items and allow switching the active selection between them.

Surely. First time I used clipboard management was long time ago somewhen in windows xp era. But growing older make me not really incentivized on trying myself to relearn clipboard history gestures. I might do that someday though.

The difference is now I know git and text editor with hot-save support; with mostly textual clipboard, the texts usually just land in either git/editor.

So far the alternatives to capricious developer choices are:

- Draw Chinese characters into a translator

- Just have every website support every language ever

- Install cliboard manager software to handle the fact you don’t always want to copy

Gotta love HN.

It's frustrating that sharing workarounds in good faith attracts drive-by snark like this comment.

I don't want a good-faith workaround for a website hijacking my clipboard. I want the website and its developers to stop doing things that are stupid and wrong.

I don't disagree! But as long as they continue to do stupid and wrong things, workarounds remain useful.

Here's my recent favorite UI for ID numbers

Hover shows icon for copy rich link Clicking shows menu with copy plain text, copy rich link, search for backlinks, etc Element itself is a link that can be ⌘-clicked, right clicked etc

My company has dedicated years of engineering time to add custom "copy" buttons next to text that they spent months to make non-selectable.

That's why we don't have flying cars.

> text that they spent months to make non-selectable.

Just curious, what was the original reason(s) to make the text non-selectable.

I chuckled. I reflected on the hours having done metaphorically similar in developing apps.

Then all those nav headers need to have a little button on the side to open a floating div with copy-pasteable content. Or, if needed - different versions of copy-pasteable content (as a command line for copy-pasting into the terminal, json, etc.)

This is a standard UI convention used by all internal dev tools at my current company.

Oh don't worry, it's a tooltip, so you can see it, but not copy it.

I almost always copy this by double clicking after the `/` in the URL

Gitlab has killed this with their slide in issues. If you have an issue open, and you copy the address, it's just a huge unique ID context thing. So you have to scroll to the top and use the little copy link button at the top of the page.

Enter, stage left, ServiceNow hell urls

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