I hate screenshots of text
parkscomputing.com
parkscomputing.com
Another thing I wish was more common is metadata in screenshots, especially on phones. Eg if I take a screenshot of a picture in Instagram, I wish a URL of the picture was embedded (eg instagram.com/p/ABCD1234/). If I take a screenshot in the browser, include the URL that's being viewed (+ path to the DOM element in the viewport). If I take a screenshot in a maps app, include the bounding coordinates. If I take a screenshot in a PDF viewer, include a SHA1 hash of the document being viewed + offset in the document so that if I send the screenshot to someone else with the same document, it can seamlessly link to it. Etc etc.
There are probably privacy concerns to solve here, but no idea is new in computer science and I'm pretty sure some grad student somewhere has already explored the topic in depth (it just never made it to mainstream computing platforms).
It feels like screenshots have become the de facto common denominator in our mobile computing era, since platforms have abstracted files away from us. Lots of people who have only ever used phones as their main computing devices are confused when it comes to files, but everyone seems to understand screenshots.
Also, necessary shout out to Screenshot Conf! https://screenshot.arquipelago.org
Google/Apple have taken notice. Both have recently redone their full-screen post-screenshot UI to include AI insights / automatic product searches / direct chat with Gemini/LLM / etc.
Its true everyone uses screenshots to save things they are interested in or want to look up / search more of / save for reason and this UI is the perfect place to insert themselves.
Maybe the problem is sharing without caring and/or without being aware.
Case in point, folks capture large blocks of text as you mentioned and paste it into slack which converts certain characters unless included in a code block. This can be much worse than sharing a screenshot.
Please know the best way to share what you are sharing when you share. I've had to come to expect this request will not be honored.
I also might be guilty of not honoring sharing with caring myself. For example, I didn't read this entire thread before posting; others may have made this exact point already.
There are companies like Evernote/Zight/CloudApp that at one point tried some things like this, but they never really caught - I think because it's pretty easy to add annotations yourself or some note of your own - and a screenshot not "trying to do everything" is part of what makes them useful & ubiquitous.
The apps don't have to know a screenshot was taken for this feature to exist; they could write into a passive "in case a screenshot is taken, use this as metadata" object data field that the OS uses when the user takes a screenshot
deep linking allows apps to know/intercept known URLs and do "things". I don't know if the screenshot mechanism would involve this.
I do know that some things cannot be screenshotted. On macs this is any HDCP image on the screen (shows up as a blank rectangle). On android I believe some apps cannot be captured in a screenshot. Don't know about ios.
A few months ago a warehouse manager sent us a list of serial numbers and the model numbers of some gear they were using -- with both fields being alphanumeric.
This list was hand-written on notebook paper, in pencil. It was photographed with a digital camera under bad lighting, and that photograph was then emailed.
The writing was barely legible. It was hard to parse. It was awful. It made my boss's brain hurt trying to work with it, and then he gave it to me and it made my brain hurt too.
If I had to read this person's writing every day I would have gotten used to it eventually, but in all likelihood I'll never read something this person has written ever again. I didn't want to train myself for that and I didn't have enough of a sampleset to train with, anyway.
And if it were part of a high-school assignment it would have been sent back with a note at the top that said "Unreadable -- try again."
But it wasn't a high school student, and I wasn't their teacher. They were a paying customer and this list was worth real money to us.
I shoved it into ChatGPT and it produced output that was neatly formatted into a table just as I specified with my minimal instruction ("Read this. Make a table.").
The quality was sufficient to allow us to fairly quickly compare the original scribbles to the OCR output, make some manual corrections that we humans knew how to do (like "6" was sometimes transposed with "G"), and get a result that worked for what we needed to accomplish without additional pain.
0/10. I'm glad it worked and I hope I never have to do that again, but will repeat if I must.
Talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6558_-_de_-_saal_g_-_201412282...
Bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox#Character_substitution_b...
ML models to recognize handwriting have existed way before LLMs could call tools, though
Identifying digits is like the "Hello World!" of ML
AI is whatever hasn't been done yet.
— Larry Tesler, 1970
bloody hell of all privacy concerns
It didn't make it in the release version out of fear that people would use MacPaint as a Word Processor.
Interesting idea, but I think this understates how often screenshots are "slightly adversarial". I'm taking a screenshot because the app or webpage has deliberately made it hard to select text for some reason. Or the UI is just annoying about selection (e.g. trying to select the text from a link anchor without being considered as having clicked on it, which is fiddly on Android).
Then there's the question of fully adversarial screenshots. I can definitely see why people want "I want to send this to someone and discourage them from seamlessly resharing it", but at the same time: it's my screen. Not generally a problem on desktops unless you're dealing with video content.
Your OCR isn't going to help you for the missing off-screenshot clipped parts.
- Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
- Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
- Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
- Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Obviously if somebody needs a whole file or whole log, then send the whole thing as an attachment. But very often I'll still include a screenshot of the relevant part. With line numbers, it's not difficult to jump to the right part of the attached file.
Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Let me introduce you to Putty users who never change the default font...
(OP’s blog purports to be pertinent to freelance software development).
I'm biased, but I can't help but feel like chances are, if the screenshot is text, the content of the text is important, not the visual aspects.
99% of the time I get a screenshot these days, it's people sending me screenshots of text logs or code, and almost always cropped in a way that eliminates any context anyway. Give me plain text or give me death.
Columns actually aligning in columns? Indentation being preserved? Lines not getting interrupted with overflowing previous lines?
When I send a screenshot, it's precisely because the visual aspects do matter. (Obviously, when they don't, then I just send the text.)
In some cases visuals are important, and in other cases, they're not. Hence why I said "chances are" and declared my bias rather than using absolutist language. However, somewhat ironically, you chopped off that part of my reply. I find it odd you chose to respond the way you did, but I digress.
I also carefully indicated my every day interactions with screenshots do not align with those requirements.
Of course there are situations where visual aspects are critical. I'm not disputing that. I'm stating my _preferences_ and my _opinion_ that situation is exceptional.
- displaying a white background image of text when I'm using dark mode;
- using a small font to a user with a visual imparement or on a high DPI display;
- using a colour scheme with low contrast, or colours that are indistinguishable for people with a form of colour blindness;
- using a font that is difficult to read for someone with dislexia;
- etc.
And others have mentioned not being able to search for the text within the image, or select/highlight the text (useful for copying a function name, link, or term in the text, or for keeping track of where you are when reading).
Is widely supported to add code. E.g. in Slack, Confluence...
It depends on the terminal. Some will actually preserve the line breaks vs soft wraps. Those terminals will reflow the text when you resize the window.
But if you already have the file you might as well run something like `xclip <file` to copy its contents directly to the clipboard.
As for attaching a file, I'm usually screenshotting small amounts of code - usually of the ephemeral variety.
Yes, I use that wherever it exists. It's great, and you're lucky when it's there. I wish it was everywhere. But as long as it's not, for everything else, there's screenshots.
And no, no SMS client I've ever seen uses a monospaced font.
Sure, if you want someone to reproduce the text of course you'd send them actual text. But to show a problem, a picture is, as they say, worth 1000 words.
That's the point.
If have an ASCII table that is 150 character columns wide, I'm sending you a screenshot so that you can scroll left and right, rather than have everything end up in a jumble of interleaved overflowing lines that turn into unreadable spaghetti.
This is a feature, not a bug. Not everyone is opening the message on a full-width monitor.
I don't want to make them have to jump through hoops to reformat the text in a different application. That's absurd.
Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
> - Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font? This points at the rare occasion where there's a problem with the setup, but you could also argue that maybe there's a system with a broken image decompressor.
> Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe? Its awful[^0], but that's more of a GMail problem that could be solved if they wanted.
[^0]: Column width unbounded even on 4k monitors. Weird and inconsistent font sizes across different fonts (monospace is smaller). Reads poorly on phones too.
For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
> When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font?
When was the last time I have to read something in a font I can't control that is forced to be proportional? Oh, constantly. Literally all the time.
> Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe?
Yes, and messaging clients, and chat clients, and everything unless it has actual dedicated code blocks that render with a horizontal scroll bar. Which are the exception as opposed to the rule.
> For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
I don't think I have seen unaligned html tables, nor unaligned spreadsheets made from CSV/TSV/etc. Images are worse than PDF, so I guess it's 0-stars in the 5-star data tier.
I'm talking about tables output in the terminal, in ASCII by SQL or something. By Python's tabulate. Output from a script. Or yes, even HTML tables or spreadsheet cells that get pasted into the message client as plaintext and lose their table formatting.
This isn't about a standard for publicly distributed open datasets, what are you on about? This is about quick messages in a chat or e-mail.
Sounds like a message client problem to me. You are switching to a worse data exchange format just to get around a very basic implementation of the paste API.
Pictures are a worse exchange format than the data even a PDF or CSV, which is why I mentioned the RDF data exchange tier list, not because I'm on hard drugs.
Is it convenient to send Images on whatever message client you use? Sure, but as a receiver of the data in a picture you can do nothing but type the data yourself (yeah, you can ask for the source too, but on async comm channels that may not arrive in the same day).
More often than not, you have no control over your client thanks to proprietary protocols and interop-hostile apps. So yes, it's a message client problem, but that fact doesn't change anything.
Yes, of course it is. That's the entire point.
It's a very needed workaround for most message clients, since most message clients don't support code blocks with horizontal scroll.
For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it. It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation). Also bear in mind that even the most basic of font and colour choices (large/small font, dark/light mode) can cause accessibility issues for some readers.
For copying and pasting purposes, images suck. Yes, macOS can do it, sort of, and I expect Windows 11 can do it too, probably to about the same extent. But it's not as easy as having the text right there in copyable form.
For searching purposes, ditto - only worse, because at least when you copy and paste and it comes out wrong, you'll notice. When you search: you just won't find the thing. You'll never know.
Which is why screenshots help, for the reasons I gave
> people reading can copy and paste it
Why? If there's something like a user ID or error code that the person needs as text, I'll paste that separately. Stuff I include in a screenshot is for understanding, not copying and pasting.
> and people searching can actually find it.
Which is what the message text around the screenshot is for. Which actually includes the relevant keywords, not random tabular data or lines of code which just add noise to search.
> Anybody wanting to look at the actual text in context won't be doing it in the chat, but will rather be opening the file of interest in the appropriate tool, and examining it that way;
Except when they aren't/can't. The whole point of screenshots is for when they can't access something easily that way, which happens for a million different reasons.
> anybody stuck reading the text only in the chat is probably on their phone or something and will be best served by being able to easily see all of it.
Which is what images make far easier to read without being messed up.
> For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it.
No it's not. Wrapping destroys indentation and alignment. It's not "so be it", it goes from readable to literally unreadable. I can't change the width of my phone or a lot of viewing areas. I can always scroll an image horizontally though.
> It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation).
Which is why zooming and panning exist. I don't know where you're getting something silly like 3713 pixels though. But if that's the width of some massive table whose layout needs to be preserved, then so be it.
You keep trying to frame that photo is superior, when, sure... The image is superior in your argument only when it's accompanied with text. So is it the image that is important then? No to mention, that is contingent. If that is your point, then, sure, I don't mind, add a screenshot next to the text but, please, give the text.
Unless you know the person/people you're sending something to can read screenshots, it's only right to at least accompany them with the text.
You're creating a strawman. Nobody is aruging that you send only a screenshot, devoid of context or explanation or any other text. That's absurd.
The point is, if you need to illustrate code or output then that part gets sent as a screenshot, to preserve readability. It provides extra details and context.
If you want the code or data in text format to dig in, then go get it from the files yourself, because you probably need a broader swath anyways. My message isn't a data repository. I'm including the screenshot so you can understand the issue easily, without having to open anything else.
I'm genuinely mystified by this entire conversation. I'm baffled by this idea of needing to take some example I'm sending in a screenshot and... copy and paste it into a text editor to edit it? Huh? What the heck?
Here, check out this hash. Snip! Screenshot! Here, try this code snippet. Screenshot! Here, go to this absurdly long URI. Screenshot! Try configuring your XML this way. Screenshot! (Bonus point for underspecified location)
But that's not what the blog post was about. It specifically showed a section of code that was having an issue. It's not meant to be copied and pasted, like all of your examples. It's meant to be an easily readable snippet that preserves formatting.
The only problem with the example in the blog post is that the sender didn't also say which file and line number the issue was in. But the screenshot itself is often very helpful, because many times the question can be answered without having to load up anything else.
I'm really assuming that people aren't sharing URL's by screenshot. I've been working in this field a long time and haven't encountered someone dumb enough to do that yet, knock on wood...
Which loses fidelity in your raster format screenshot world. Alternatively, when text is presented as text, a user can scale it independently for readability. Or as another commenter pointed out, use a screen reader.
You focus on a kind of permissions or network limitation technical access, between the computers in the system, but don't seem to appreciate another very real type of technical access between the user and the leaf computer in the system.
That way I get a width appropriate for my screen (which may be different from yours), text that's still aligned correctly, and uses the font of my choosing (which may differ from yours), and still has syntax highlighting (using the sizes/colors/styles that I'm accustomed to).
Sending the whole file (or a link to it) works well too but screenshots are absolutely likely to be some level of annoying for anyone who isn't you no matter how helpful you think you're being.
Forcing someone else to view code the way you like seeing it isn't always going to be completely obnoxious for them (although you might be surprised by what some people find acceptable) but it does make it difficult/impossible to view it the way I like seeing it (in addition to losing the ability to search/edit)
This is about, "hey, look at these 6 lines which is where I think the problem might be". It's not for pasting in a separate editor, why would you do that? It's about providing quick context even if you're on your phone.
If you want to go inspect that spot in the file once you're back at your computer then go do that. The screenshot is to save you time because often you can answer just based on it.
You understand you can just screenshot the code part that is 80 characters wide? You don't have to screenshot the entire full-screen window?
But even if someone does include extra width, it takes me about a tenth of a second to pinch-zoom. Which is way quicker than trying to decipher line-wrapped spaghetti.
Strong disagree there. It's far easier to read the line wrapped code than to pinch to zoom. I think you have your answer: you have different preferences than others do, and no amount of explaining is going to make their "I like cats" make sense to your "I like dogs" sensibilities.
+-----------------------------
------------------------------
---------------------+
| CustomerID | First Name |
Last Name | Email
| State | Balance |
+-----------------------------
------------------------------
---------------------+
| 000123 | Alice |
Ramirez |
alice.ramirez@acme.com | NY
| 245.50 |
| 000124 | Brian |
Chen |
bchen@northdata.io | CA
| 1289.00 |
+-----------------------------
------------------------------
---------------------+
Why are you telling me, the recipient of the crappy text screenshot, how to do it better?
Line-wrapping is also agitating, I'll give you that. Or worse yet, if the sender doesn't know how to use monospaced fonts in whatever app. I prefer a scrolling text box, which is basically a "pre-pinch-to-zoom'ed" screenshot. But with copy and paste and select. Which is even more useful on the phone, because of its limited symbols, so I can pull the relevant part, modify it, and reply.
So do I. But most clients and message mediums don't have support for that. Many don't even have support for monospace at all. Hence, screenshots to get around those limitations.
Where I work I find it's usually the youngins using a ridiculous light on dark color scheme that post screenshots of code. Are we still stuck in the '80s? And are they pining for a time they never experienced themselves? Computer hardware has been capable of displaying the more civilized and easier-on-the-eyes dark on light color schemes since then.
Emphasizing bits on code-formatted text is not as straightforward and would typically be ambiguous (was this punctuation meant for emphasis or was it part of the original text?).
Pictures are also quick to make and grasp, which is a plus when having to quickly diagnose something with others.
The main complaint in the article about having to type into a search bar instead of copying and pasting doesn't make sense. It's like a word or two at most which you'd have to search. It might even be faster to type than to copy and paste (moving cursor around, etc.).
The error log complaint would also be valid had it been text instead of a screenshot. That was a problem of not sharing enough context, not the format of the message.
- no line wrapping destroys readability more since you can't toggle it in a screenshot. Imagine that url on the screenshot taking 3 lines instead of 1 and pushing useful text off screen. Also, forcing 80 on a user of a wider monitor is barbaric.
- And if there is no tabular data (and autoformatted code doesn't do tabular code) you've just lost nice proportional text for nothing
- Syntax highlighting as is commonly used (and as is shown in the blog screenshot) is useless, and is anyway unlikely to match reader's convention
> being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
So it can't even be read properly, you have to scroll the screenshot left and right... instead of just reading
How line wrapping interacts with readability is for the reader software to worry about, not the control-freak author. Line length higher than the device width can handle can be even worse for readability than lines wrapped in the wrong places. It's one of the reasons I loathe PDFs.
> Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end
If the reader wants to have their code in hairline-width Courier, that's their right. It's not for the control-freak with awful taste in fonts to decide.
> Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful
Forces a particular style of syntax highlighting upon the reader without giving them an easy recourse to change it. No thanks.
> Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
The closest thing to a decent argument. Except pretty much any text input that accepts embedded images will usually also provide a monospace formatting option, so there is no need to screenshot text here either.
This includes Safari, where not only do images (inline or otherwise) have selectable text, but the built in translator leverages that text and uses it to translate images, too! This is super useful for translating Japanese webpages in particular, which tend to have tons of text baked into images.
But I can't be the only one appalled at the suggestion to use an LLM to parse the text. The sheer, prodigious waste of computing power, just to round-trip text to an image and back to text, when what's really missing is a computer user interface that makes it as simple to send text or other snippets as it is to send screenshots.
1. I have ‘rubber duck debugged’ my own question.
2. I checked that this question hasn’t been asked before.
3. I have noted in my message what I’ve tried.
4. I have avoided the ‘XY problem’ by clearly detailing the core problem, X.
5. I have provided specifics of my issue, not vague references or descriptions.
6. I have provided URL links to relevant content, and where possible the URL links are immutable.
7. I have not included screenshots of text in my message.
8. I have not used obscure acronyms or abbreviations.
9. I have formatted my message well, particularly paying attention to code formatting and headings.
10. I have not just said “hi” and waited for a reply.
Like other posters, I don't think Apple OCR is sufficient to make up for screenshotting. The biggest problem is search.
1. https://thundergolfer.com/communication/slack/2021/02/24/how...
Both Spotlight and Photos will find text in screenshots.
Different horses, then.
The reason I personally hate it is I am often working from my phone. And it’s much easier to read text rendered properly than pinch zooming text in an image. What’s worse is slack will downgrade images for mobile and you can’t even pinch zoom in fully.
It is extra work to do both but I like to be through even when asking for help. Even if the other side doesn't need it -- because I myself might not remember all the nuances when I refer to that conversation later.
Also screenshot preserves (before any fixes) the exact way things looked when I confronted a certain situation. The visual of the screenshot serves as a much stronger reminder of that situation and my thinking ...way better than mere copy pasted text.
Not nice for the recipient maybe, but hella efficient for everyone else, and there are many more people in the latter camp than the former.
#!/bin/sh
set -o pipefail
lang=${2:-eng}
if tesseract "$1" - -l $lang | xclip -selection clipboard ; then
notify-send "Text copied"
else
notify-send "Could not copy text"
fi
When the text is especially difficult for tesseract, I can use Gemma3-4B via llama.cpp's llama-mtmd-cli, but that takes a minute.
Screenshots are fine. Just don't ONLY send screenshots.
Nothing against screenshots unless they are lacking context
"Thanks for sending this over to me, can you please send me a link to the code segment from source control?"
It's not hard to be polite and firm.
Me and my teammates regularly get by on one word responses. Nobody interprets it as rude, we’re all busy and don’t get our feathers in a bunch over this kind of stuff. If someone did, they’d need coaching not the other way around.
Your example: “I don’t have enough information to help you.”
8 words in length, it gives the impression of closure. There isn’t enough information, therefore I can’t help.
“Can you send the code link so I can help more?”
11 words in length, it not only adds actionable instructions to help rectify the lack of information, it also signals your intention to be a good collaborator and provide some kind of path forward.
Two more words gets you all that. That’s amazingly efficient (I.e., concise).
“We’re all too busy to be nice” is how you end up with everyone
There’s no rudeness. There’s nothing unfriendly. That’s your fantasy. It’s in your head.
Some people may feel the same as you, and I’m ok with it. They will quickly learn I mean no harm by it. I’m glad to help. They need to give me all the information to do so. Once that’s happened, we get from Q to A in a shorter amount of time and with less total communication. Less words, fewer messages, reduced time to resolution.
If they’ve given me a concerted effort to frame their question with support, giving me an actual shot of helping them without making it more of a burden to understand what they’re even asking, I’m more likely to engage and be specific on a follow up question. I think you’re forgetting the linked article is talking about absolute half assed attempts for asking for help. Is that not itself rude? Unfriendly?
I am suggesting that a completely different instruction be offered to the person making this request.
However, a screenshot acts like a print-out / pdf, and very handy for sharing in other platforms e.g social media, mobile devices.
Like many others I like the use of ai for OCR in imagery. Won't be long before ai tool can copy the style + content from an image, or video.
That says all you need to know. The reason they send those screenshots is they believe the full context is more helpful. Code formatting, indentation etc.
Personally I agree with that sentiment. There is a lot of context in the full visual of the original text in situ.
Maybe I should put the photos of notes into a PowerPoint?
>The image shows a code snippet, likely written in C#, that retrieves and processes data from a WordPress API. The code checks for an empty slug, makes an HTTP GET request to a specific URL, and then attempts to parse the JSON response. It includes error handling for both HTTP failures and invalid JSON.
>The code uses C# and is designed to interact with the WordPress REST API...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext...
We do use screenshots extensively, but alongside links and copied text when necessary
If it's some new greenfield project, I definitely want a script rather than a screenshot, but if you're saying "i think this line is the issue", "here's my error stack" or "what if we added something here?" then I'll happily recieve screenshots if it's easier for you!
(just please, please, semd me something and not just "there's am issue with x because it is throwing me an error")
Don't ask to ask, just ask; and post a link and a line number.
That being said, I've had to twist some arms in a previous job for new employees attaching screenshots of a log viewer instead of the whole logs. The big problem was training: Once I made it very clear to the entire team that unedited logs were critical to solving problems, management made sure that all newcomers knew how to attach unedited logs.
Often, the screenshot of the code is exactly what I need, because it shows code syntax highlighted and I don't need to copy and paste it in the editor.
I honestly thought this was going to be solved in the 2010s with the rise of comic-like memes, but we just kept sharing images with ever increasing compression artifacts as things were shared around and used to create new memes.
Your coding agent is not very smart if it can't deal with something as simple as OCR'ing an image and processing all the references in it, or letting you just select text from an image and searching or copying to the clipboard.
Linux desktop users will get there one day.
Many up-to-date messaging environments allow you to copy & paste text directly from your coding environment with indentation and syntax coloring intact. This is something the sender can establish before hitting "Send".
Also, the sender has the option to attaching the source file, which if entered into a coding environment will recreate the syntax colors.
What about just asking them what file that is?
If I copy code from PyCharm or VS Code and paste it into fucking Microsoft Word, even spawn-of-Satan-MS-Word-for-Mac respects most of my formatting. Plenty of web text editors are also able to do that.
But Slack, "The King of Useless Features Nobody Asked For", can't bother themselves to implement such a useful feature for their primary market.
Has OP tried communicating?
"Thanks for sending me this screenshot. Can you also send over the link to this code block in our source control?"
I am hyper-sensitive to emailing terminal screenshots in MS Outlook, as they cannot be searched.
I imagine I'd have similar frustrations if I couldn't copy-paste the text easily though!
????? Just OCR a line and paste it into the IDE’s search field???? Or, if for some baffling reason you don’t have the ability to OCR, just pick out a function declaration in the screenshot and search for that? We’re so doomed as a profession.
SVG maybe?
I see two possible reasons for this -- the sender has no technical experience, or they're focused on making things more difficult for the recipient.
But when trying to decide between these two, I'm reminded of the saying, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
This actually happened. A client wrote me, saying, "First, don't treat me like an idiot -- I have years of computer experience."
"Okay, I promise," I replied. "What's the problem?"
"Your program doesn't work."
"Can you be more specific?"
"I followed your instructions to the letter, but I see an error message."
"Okay, what is the error message?"
"It says, 'User [Enter your name here] is not found'."
Less of it about now but used for multilingual websites for the secondary language, particularly if non-latin alphabet. Will no-one think of Unicode!
... Is this really common?
Only among people who don't code. A non-coder doesn't know the difference between a block of code, and a picture of a block of code.
A woman visits the studio of a famous artist. She says, "That woman is all distorted!" The artist replies, "Madam, that is not a woman, that is a picture of a woman."
Maybe vibe coders. :) People who have never been in the opposite predicament.