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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

> Not every text in a user interface is supposed to be selectable. Can you select the text on your buttons, your tabs, your dropdowns? Of course not, because it doesn't make sense.

It would make sense, and all text in a user interface should be user selectable and offer the same behaviors.

Maybe you need to copy and paste a lengthy error message. Maybe there’s a word you don’t understand you want to look up in a dictionary. Maybe the interface isn’t in your native language and you want to translate it.

The fact that most mainstream computing environments don’t offer this in 2019 doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do, rather that our systems have regressed in some (many?) areas when it comes to usability.

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> It would make sense, and all text in a user interface should be user selectable and offer the same behaviors.

How would you know? You have never used such a system because it doesn't exist, how do you know it's better?

If you had ever implemented something like a drag and drop UI, a context menu, or even a a simple button using plain old HTML, you would've immediately noticed that selectable text interferes with user interaction. It's the first thing you disable and it's the reason why "user-select:none" must exist.

> How would you know? You have never used such a system because it doesn't exist

I have, it does, it's called Oberon, it was glorious.

Copying text from UI elements was also never an issue for me in GTK2 (can't speak for 3, haven't used it much), it was great (although I admit I don't know if there were a few places in the system where I couldn't copy text, it may not have been 100% the case).

When I'm working in terminal apps (more often than you can likely imagine) on Linux I can also expect to copy text everywhere, it's great.

I'd encourage you to use a diversity of computing systems, it'll broaden your perspective and imagination and sense of possibilities :)

Pardon my ignorance, I assumed we were talking about actual GUIs, not (glorified) text interfaces.

I have used text interfaces, but they are inferior for most users and many types of applications.

> I'd encourage you to use a diversity of computing systems, it'll broaden your perspective and imagination and sense of possibilities :)

I suggest the same to you, but at the application level, not at the "computing system" level. There are a lot of possibilities with graphical user interfaces that aren't limited to text.

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