On Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:54:31 +0000, Tim Golden wrote: > At least for Windows users, grabbing a partial screenshot (eg of text) > has been very easy since Windows 7 when the "Snipping Tool" was added to > the builtins.
Thanks, I didn't know that. > Certainly easier for the average user than trying to do a > slightly tricky rectangle selection within the Windows console. But I'm not seeing that it could possibly be easier than selecting text and hitting copy and paste. Not even in the Windows console, which I admit is a bit clunky, let alone a modern IDE. More *familiar*, maybe, but easier? [...] > FWIW I agree with you; and I even see this at work in different forms: > someone sends a screenshot of a spreadsheet to illustrate a problem > rather than the sheet itself. (When there's no especial sensitivity > which might otherwise be a good reason). Ah, this is the 21st century equivalent of somebody printing a document, scanning it, and emailing the scan. (Bonus points if they somehow manage to get the pages out of order or upside down when scanning.) > But most people don't interact with text-only forums these days, so it's > only natural that the don't consider that aspect of things. No, sorry, I don't agree with that. I'm not talking about "most people", I'm talking about programmers, nor about "text-only" forums. Even if attachments came through, it would still be a bad idea to send screenshots to ask questions about your code. Unless your sole programming language is Scratch or another "visual programming language", you're writing text and your question is about text. And the output is almost certainly text. Especially in the case of an exception, say. (If your question is about, say, the layout of graphical elements in your GUI, then a screenshot is fine -- I'm not a troglodyte, I understand that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.) And writing an email requires writing text. And when people ask "fix my code for me", they are expecting to receive text they can copy and paste back. So text is the natural media for this sort of question, and there's nothing natural about thinking "I know, I'll take a virtual photo of this text and send that". I didn't even say *plain text*. I would completely understand it -- hate it, but understand it -- if people posted HTML and marked up their text with comments and colour. Hell, I'm even willing to consider that /maybe/ programming source code should be some form of rich text. But at least rich text is text, not a bunch of pixels. I'm sorry to the OP of the other thread if he feels I'm picking on him, I'm not intending to single him out. I'm just seeing this habit more and more often in many different forums, and I had to ask where it was coming from. It's obviously *learned* behaviour: there's nothing natural about taking a screen shot to ask a question. I'm not surprised that yet again Microsoft has made the world a little bit worse by trying to make things easier for ordinary (l)users, and their bad habits are spreading into the programming community. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
