Mastodawn

I just whined about this elsewhere, but this makes a good post, so:
1. a very good feature of default Win32 message boxes is that they implement Ctrl-C to copy the error message and window title into the clipboard (formatted and everything)
2. way too few people know this, and accordingly, custom message boxes basically never implement this
3. if you work on custom UI libraries that have some message box facility, you should!

ajft [SEC=continvoucly morged]Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous so many times in a support role have I asked people to use this, and so many times do they ignore our request and screen grab the message box (or entire screen), paste that into a Word document, then email the Word document

Aras Pranckevičius Oct 3, 2023

@ajft @rygorous luxury! people these days film the screen with their phone, and send a video

aburka 🫣Oct 3, 2023

@aras @ajft @rygorous More like they say, "yeah we got an error last week, I heard from my employee who said his coworker saw some kind of pop-up but they closed it because it was in the way, but can you tell us why it doesn't work? We have a demo for the CEO in 10 minutes"

Matteꙮ Italia Oct 3, 2023

@aburka @aras @ajft @rygorous ultimately the game changer for this is logging, although once we had to set up a separate, (barely) encrypted log for user-specified commands, as we had users that broke stuff and tried to hide their fault adjusting "regular" logs.

Andre Weissflog Oct 3, 2023

@aburka @aras @ajft @rygorous that's why I insisted on making assert/error popups not ignoreable in our inhouse tools, even if that way any triggered assert disrupts the artist workflow. Unfortunately that's the only way to get breakage actually fixed instead of ignored.

Martijn van Dijk Oct 4, 2023

@aburka @aras @ajft @rygorous "A lack of planning on your side does not constitute an emergency on mine."

Matteꙮ Italia Oct 3, 2023

@aras @ajft @rygorous given that people just send us photos of errors via WhatsApp, I've seriously proposed to add a QR code with the relevant info in our main application error dialog (but TBF it's generally used on machines that may not have connectivity, so it's somehow understandable).

Riley S. Faelan Oct 3, 2023

@cvtsi2sd The machines don't need connectivity. It's possible to encode an error message into a barcode entirely offline.

[email protected] @ajft @rygorous

Alexander The 1st Oct 3, 2023

@riley @cvtsi2sd @ajft @rygorous I think they'd need to be pre-compiled though, since my first thought is; you want a program that hit an error/exception to not handle that, but instead generate an QR code while displaying an error message?

Is it possible? Probably - unless the error/exception it hit was an OutOfMemoryException, because then you won't have the memory to do that.

Matteꙮ Italia Oct 3, 2023

@AT1ST @riley @ajft @rygorous if the program state is so fucked up it cannot manage to generate a QR code, probably it can't even display the error dialog; it's a thing that does happen from time to time, but it's a very small minority of errors (and that's why the error handler tries to handle the problem doing cleanup actions in order of increasing "risk of further crash" and decreasing importance). The cleanest thing would be to handle at least the reporting part from a fresh process, though.

Riley S. Faelan Oct 3, 2023

@cvtsi2sd There's no reason why generating a QR code for an error code should require allocating new memory. If you want to really push it, it can even be done without using new stack frames (although, if you can call the system API that displays an error message, you can't be entirely out of stack space just yet).

@AT1ST @ajft @rygorous

Matteꙮ Italia Oct 3, 2023

@riley @ajft @rygorous I think there's a misunderstanding, I was saying is that it's understandable that they send me WhatsApp photos of the screen instead of nice screenshots, because those machines generally don't have connectivity, so taking a picture with the phone is much faster for our technicians. QR code generation would be entirely in-app, it makes no sense to use a network service for that.

Sören Oct 3, 2023

@ajft @rygorous yeah, because it’s not obvious at all that this is a feature.

You’re lucky you didn’t get the screenshot as a fax. (I speak from experience.)

Jernej Simončič �Oct 3, 2023

@ajft @rygorous I always prefer the Word document over a picture of the screen taken with a phone.

Matthew Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous Or...and I know I'm preaching UX maximalism in an era when feature-shrouding design is the dominant ethos...devs could include a "COPY" button, which could help with point #2. 🤔

Javier Oct 3, 2023

@ironmaus @rygorous

Sounds like a good idea... but given that now I've started getting code snippets from personal developers as screenshots of their editor... I really don't understand how people think.

Dominik Grabiec Oct 3, 2023

@javierg @ironmaus @rygorous I got that too, pasted screenshots of code and error dialogs in Slack instead of code or text. I think it may be because it is easier to use a snipping tool than to cut and paste exact text, it they are just used to doing that.

Professor Emeritus Blake Y Rat Oct 3, 2023

@javierg @ironmaus @rygorous Windows-Shift-S is way quicker than copy-paste, format-as-code, select correct language for highlighting...

Unless the person needs to actually EDIT and return the code, screenshots are way quicker and easier to get correctly formatted and color-coded snippets to them.

MIGRATED TO: [email protected]Oct 3, 2023

@ironmaus @rygorous i don't see why you can't just make the text in your message boxes selectable at the very least

Aras Pranckevičius Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous people doing custom controls/UIs get even way more basic things wrong. Your modal message box, does it accept Esc/Enter keys? How about space? Tab?

A drop-down list, can I start typing and it scrolls to these entries? PageUp/Down? Arrow keys?

*Soo* much custom UI shit is made to only work with mouse and touch. Ugh.

Fabian Giesen Oct 3, 2023

@aras Yes.

Sören Oct 3, 2023

@aras @rygorous and that’s before you get to accessibility.

Jernej Simončič �Oct 3, 2023

@aras @rygorous Custom? Windows "modern" UI is unusable without a mouse – if you're doing a clean install of Windows 11, you can't pass OOBE without a mouse (one of the screens where you just have to click Next does not respond to keyboard, which is a problem with laptops, since the trackpad doesn't work during OOBE sometimes; not to mention the language selection dialogs, which only respond to ↑↓ keys and not typing, so selecting anything but the default language is a chore even with a mouse).

Aras Pranckevičius Oct 3, 2023

@jernej__s @rygorous that falls under custom :) Microsoft has gobs of standard and tested and working UI controls among the 7 or so UI frameworks they use. But no, some blob somewhere decided that they will do their own for the OOBE screen :(

Jernej Simončič �Oct 3, 2023

@aras @rygorous The "modern" UI I mentioned is what they're using in the UWP programs such as Settings, and it has these problems.

Owen Beresford Oct 3, 2023

@aras @rygorous talking about Widgets, rather than win32. Proper auto-complete is a large volume of inputs to handle. and timings

I spend alot of time putting things like that onto the requirements e.g. Search boxes should accept paste properly, be it <cntl-C> or <long tap> Android mini-menu

This improves reusability.

Benjohn Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous going the step further and adding a “web search for this error” button 👌

🔻 aetios 🇪🇺Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous I want all my time back that i spent typing over error codes...

Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous I am in fact pleasantly surprised how many games that have copyable (yes I can verbify anything!) error codes in their (custom) message boxes. You kinda assume they aren't.

Too few, but still more than expected.

NCommander Oct 3, 2023

When was this added? I've never seen this documented prior.

@ncommander @rygorous pretty sure it's been like this for at least a decade

@halcy @ncommander @rygorous At least since XP days; grep'd my IRC logs and the first time I saw it mentioned was 2005 :)

Andre Weissflog Oct 3, 2023

@ncommander @rygorous it goes at least as far back as Windows XP, what would be interesting to know whether it came from the Windows NT side, or the "Windows for Muggles" side.

Jernej Simončič �Oct 3, 2023

@floooh @ncommander @rygorous I just tested – Ctrl+C in message boxes was introduced with Windows 2000 – it doesn't work in NT4, nor 98/ME.

Jernej Simončič �Oct 3, 2023

@ncommander @rygorous It's been there at least since Windows 2000, and possibly earlier.

Claudio Zizza 🦜Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous Thanks. I'll have to try this.

Wolf480pl Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous imagine if the text was selectable so that people could actually have a way to.find out that you can copy it

Dizzy Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous never knew this was a thing

Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous they should just add a visible button too, tho

Riley S. Faelan Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous Classic UX design failure. The Ctrl-C feature is not discoverable. There should be an explicit button for it, next to [ Ok ].

(I'll make a note to do this one thing correctly when I get around to the Big Pile Of Stuff To Someday To item of porting Turbo Vision to modern terminals, with Blackjack and Unicode.)

Dan Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous how did I not know this!? Heck

Jay Bazuzi Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous @KirillOsenkov why was this cool feature built in an impossible-to-discover way? What's the point if most people never even know about it? Same with:

Clipboard history (windows-v)

Paste plain text (ctrl-shift-v)

Copy path in explorer (shift rclick)

MIGRATED TO: [email protected]Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous i'm guessing the reason nobody uses the default win32 error messages is because they look absolutely archaic. why does the "OK" button look the same as it did in windows 95? devs don't typically want their software to look like it's from nearly 30 years ago... if only microsoft didn't completely botch the transition from win32 to UWP

Christoph Petrausch Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous They should have added a second button. "Copy to clipboard". So everybody knows this feature.

Pxl Phile Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous TIL, thanks! Of course hidden interaction possibilities is a dark pattern to begin with.

But my guess is Win32 was the wild west of computing (don't make me count how yound win32 actually is 😅)

𒀭𒂗𒆠 ENKI ][e Oct 3, 2023

honestly, every major OS has a really rich and powerful copy/paste system, but because every major OS's copy/paste system works slightly differently outside of the most trivial case (putting a small amount of plain text on the clipboard), cross-platform UI libraries don't generally expose more than that. it sucks.

like, x11 copy/paste is basically a general-purpose inter-process message-passing system

ben Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous It kind of feels like a failure of UI design, though, that there's absolutely no indication that it's possible to do that.

Ambrosia Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous how was i supposed to know that

keen456 keen456 Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous Whoa - this is fascinating to hear.

Tim Reed Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous but the error text in the message box is typically not itself selectable/copyable which is frustrating since that’s one of the things people do with onscreen text. It’s great that it’s possible to control-C the box and get everything but that’s really not obvious.

Jeroen Postma 🇪🇺Oct 3, 2023

@rygorous thanks for posting this! Never knew this was possible and a one source of frustration with using Windows was copying error messages (or lack of support for that matter).

It'd be even better if all these boxes allow text selection (and then copy). That'd often be more useful than a fully formatted text, but hey it's something.

eestileib (she/hers)Oct 3, 2023

TIL. Very cool.

Kara Goldfinch Oct 4, 2023

@rygorous I have been using windows since Windows 95 and never knew you could do this. wow.