How is this possible in 2121 ?

[MathWizard]

In windowds 7/8/10, there's lots of little settings/warnings/etc windows that pop up, and often the message doesn't fit in a line, or in the box, or in the column.

But then I can't make the window bigger, or expand the column wide enough, to even read the stuff.

And ALSO.........how many times, I can't copy-text over some critical info in a window/pop-up. Maybe I could use the sniping tool,  I should remember that now.......but still, how many times in windows, CAN I NOT COPY A WARNING/ERROR MEASSAGE.

How does MicroSoft mange that , or what am I missing, besides snipping tool?

[SilverSolder]

Get the error dialog (or any other window you want to capture) in the foreground as the active window.

Hit Alt - PrintScreen on your keyboard.

Paste into Paint

Done!

[Circlotron]

MathWizard will now demonstrate some mad skillz with math by subtracting 100 from the thread title. 
Just joking, friend. 

[MathWizard]

Ok I'll try that thanks

Also when did Crtl-Alt-Del stop being CAD ? That hasn't seemed to work as I wished even in win7. But Now what was before win7, oh right winXp. I was thinking win3.1 for a moment.

[Mechatrommer]

how do you screen capture if window is too small to read the whole thing? maybe is what you looking for... right click -> select all (or ctrl-A) and then right click -> copy (ctrl-C).. yeah i think the OP meant 2021 instead of 2121, sorry today is not the future yet

[JohnnyMalaria]

Get the error dialog (or any other window you want to capture) in the foreground as the active window.

Hit Alt - PrintScreen on your keyboard.

Paste into Paint

Done!

You can also use Win+PrintScreen and it will save the image automatically to C:\Users\xxxx\Pictures\Screenshots as well as put it on the clipboard. But it only does the whole screen. Useful if you are trying to grab screenshots from a webinar etc.

[CJay]

Get the error dialog (or any other window you want to capture) in the foreground as the active window.

Hit Alt - PrintScreen on your keyboard.

Paste into Paint

Done!

You can also use Win+PrintScreen and it will save the image automatically to C:\Users\xxxx\Pictures\Screenshots as well as put it on the clipboard. But it only does the whole screen. Useful if you are trying to grab screenshots from a webinar etc.

You can also do Alt-Win-PRTSC and it will capture the active window.

[Ranayna]

The text of standard windows messageboxes can simply be copied by pressing CTRL-C.
This is very unituitive, because nothing indicates that this works, but this should copy the text, titlebar and button options, ready to be pasted into Notepad.

For example, the unsaved warning of mmc.exe:

Code: [Select]

---------------------------
Microsoft Management Console
---------------------------
Save console settings to Console2?
---------------------------
Yes   No   Cancel   
---------------------------

Sadly, that does not always work, even with warnings that look absolutly the same. The Office unsaved document warning, as an example, can not be copied.

[SiliconWizard]

The text of standard windows messageboxes can simply be copied by pressing CTRL-C.
This is very unituitive, because nothing indicates that this works, but this should copy the text, titlebar and button options, ready to be pasted into Notepad.

Sadly, that does not always work, even with warnings that look absolutly the same. The Office unsaved document warning, as an example, can not be copied.

I think this is a per-application specific behavior rather than a general feature on OS-standard messageboxes. I tried on a few apps that I know do use the std messagebox, and it certainly doesn't work.
OTOH, an app can always implement this feature by implementing their own messagebox control. Implementing CTRL-C on top of a std MessageBox control on Windows is easy, but it's not a standard behavior AFAIK.

As to why those std dialogs are still not resizable, that's a good question. On Windows, many std dialogs (fortunately some are) are still not user-resizable, which can be pretty annoying.
This is of course a feature that, even if not implemented in some std dialogs, can be implemented in any app relatively easily, but it looks like many app designers do not bother.

[Fixpoint]

How does MicroSoft mange that , or what am I missing, besides snipping tool?

Much stuff below the surface of Windows still dates from Windows 95, which means that many of the UI deficiencies of that era are still present. Windows is a *huge* system, it's much than just an operating system, so maintaining and updating all that code is much work, given that new stuff has to be implemented all the time.

[rstofer]

And don't worry about the date, they will still be a problem 100 years from now!

[Ranayna]

@SiliconWizard: I cannot claim to be a proficient programmer, but i can cobble together something that works (to a degree :p) in c#, using Visual Studio.

A bog standard System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox allows for copying, without having to do anthing special to it. It plays that stupid Windows "error" sound, but that might be related to it being a modal dialog, but the text goes to the clipboard anyway. So, at least in .NET, you apparently need to make an concious effort to not support that ability.

Still, as mentioned, this is horribly unintuitive. There is no way of knowing if this works, without actually trying it. My work with user support would be sooooo much better if this feature was more well known, and would work with any GUI element. And snipping tool or manual cropping are unknown to my users. Its always fun to get a BMP of a 4k dual-screen worstation via email, with just a tiny little error message somewhere in the corner. At least they can male screenshots and send them 

[Halcyon]

Welcome to what Windows has become. It's truly horrible.

[Mechatrommer]

but not nearly to make it extinct, some people still love it and found a way around its... i've seen more horrible things in day to day life, such as unable to browse between folders' content quickly and freely in dialog boxes... this small things practically add up.

[Ranayna]

The biggest issue i have, is that not even Microsoft can keep a consistent Windows GUI.
Go deep enough, and even on Windows 10 20H2 you will find dialogs that look like they were ripped right out of Windows 95. To mind come the Print Driver installer, or the ODBC configuration. Heck, look at the screensaver settings screen, it still shows a stylized CRT monitor.

The saddest thing though: The old stuff most of the time works better than any of the newly implemented stuff. The new UI of Windows 10 has become absolutely horrible. I dread the day when Micosoft finally kills the old control panel completely.

[SiliconWizard]

@SiliconWizard: I cannot claim to be a proficient programmer, but i can cobble together something that works (to a degree :p) in c#, using Visual Studio.

A bog standard System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox allows for copying, without having to do anthing special to it. It plays that stupid Windows "error" sound, but that might be related to it being a modal dialog, but the text goes to the clipboard anyway. So, at least in .NET, you apparently need to make an concious effort to not support that ability.

I dunno whatever .NET implements, but it's been known to be completely inconsistent with the Windows base UI.

I was talking about the std Windows dialogs as available from the Windows API. .NET likely implements its own dialogs. The behavior you describe, and the fact you've noticed it behaves differently depending on the application, just suggests that. Those other apps likely are not developed with .NET.

[Ranayna]

Very likely, ideed. And just another example that even Microsoft cannot keep consistent features.

[Siwastaja]

The only thing that seems to have changed is people's expectations.

Just some 15-20 years ago, Windows was quite universally treated as a joke (yet still usable one!) by anyone understanding anything about computers. Don't get me wrong, we all did use it anyway, but we didn't expect it to be anything but a tragic farce which yet, in some magical way, gets the things done. So, call it a mild version of love-hate relationship? The classical "use Microsoft products - ridicule them - still use them - work around problems - get the shit done" cycle.

I think it's after the introduction of Windows 7, "computer people" somehow started taking Windows seriously, and now the same people seem to be surprised whenever Microsoft is doing it the way Microsoft always have.

It was approximately the same time I grew out of Windows. I had surprisingly little to actually complain about Windows XP, but with Windows 7, everything that used to work (printers, USB sticks...) suddenly broke and around me, nothing but fanboyism and "this is the first good Windows". I called bullshit; if anything, it's worse than before; and so I went on and haven't looked back, good riddance.

It required the forced update farce of Windows 10 to make "computer people" ridicule Microsoft again, like in the good old days.

[Karel]

Call me paranoid if you want, but in the recent years, I noticed a trend where developers try to make it hard to copy plain text
from a GUI. It's even worse with webpages. There's even a (HTML?) setting that tells the browser that text should not be allowed to be copied 

When I need a GUI for my software, I use Qt. The standard message window/dialog (also for errors) is "QMessageBox".
With Qt4, the default was that text could be selected/highlighted and copied.
With Qt5 the default has been changed to disable the possibility to copy the text 
A developer needs to enable it explicitly now:

Code: [Select]

qApp->setStyleSheet("QMessageBox { messagebox-text-interaction-flags: 5; }");
To me it seems that developers want to have complete control over their users...

[Mechatrommer]

When I need a GUI for my software, I use Qt. The standard message window/dialog (also for errors) is "QMessageBox".
With Qt4, the default was that text could be selected/highlighted and copied.
With Qt5 the default has been changed to disable the possibility to copy the text 
A developer needs to enable it explicitly now:

Code: [Select]

qApp->setStyleSheet("QMessageBox { messagebox-text-interaction-flags: 5; }");To me it seems that developers want to have complete control over their users...

maybe Qt is still caching up with standards? Qt4 -> Qt5 has evolved very drastically, one of it is missing Arthur library in Qt5 making my learning process is in pain, i cannot make Arthur example in Qt5 as explained in Qt4 book. and i've yet to see any Qt5 book around, and now we have Qt6 Windows GUI guideline has been around since i started learning programming back in 1996, and they embedded the concept in their IDE such as VB6, i can create a GUI pretty close to the guideline in seconds. MessageBox's text has been non-copy-able since then. if you want to copy text, use secondary windows with TextBox (right click -> copy menu built in, no need a single line of code, its already in the API/dll) there is no "IDE developer is trying to control how programmers way", its only "following the guideline as a default way", there are abundant of controls and options to choose from. any programmer should read these kind of guideline before making a SWs, much like franchisee must follow guideline from franchiser, so customers will have uniform experience and common expectation among all franchisee shops.

the problem with "cross-platform" IDE like Qt imho is they want to satisfy both or all guidelines across OSes, thats why in my earlier post, i wonder why they dont provide folder sub-tree in file dialog box, they must have gotten the idea from another OS? i mean, if all OSes support folder sub tree in file dialog box, there should be no problem for cross platform IDEs to implement this uniform behaviour, but what actually happened is not.

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guidelines

https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines#human-interface-guidelines
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=gui+guideline+linux
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=gui+guideline+windows
(no pun intended, direct google link copy just give me long strecth of OS/browser specific codes so i use lmgtfy)

[SilverSolder]

[...]
To me it seems that developers want to have complete control over their users...

Some developers are probably like that, but more often it seems it is company policy (rather than a developer decision) to prevent viewers from doing anything with what they see on the screen.  Basically, they really wanted to sell you a physical product, but this was the closest they could get...

[Karel]

[...]
To me it seems that developers want to have complete control over their users...

Some developers are probably like that, but more often it seems it is company policy (rather than a developer decision) to prevent viewers from doing anything with what they see on the screen.  Basically, they really wanted to sell you a physical product, but this was the closest they could get...

One of the reasons I prefer to stay in electronics rather than to switch to fulltime software development.
Many software developers "sold their soul" writing user unfriendly software in exchange for a (better) salary.
Also, "agile" programming and "release quick, fix problems later" makes me puke.
I understand why companies do this but I don't want to be part of it.

[Karel]

the problem with "cross-platform" IDE like Qt imho is they want to satisfy both or all guidelines across OSes, thats why in my earlier post, i wonder why they dont provide folder sub-tree in file dialog box, they must have gotten the idea from another OS? i mean, if all OSes support folder sub tree in file dialog box, there should be no problem for cross platform IDEs to implement this uniform behaviour, but what actually happened is not.

It's true that QFileDialog is a bit simple but usually it's not a problem, at least not on windows and Mac.
The static functions of QFileDialog will call the native (Mac/windows) filedialog that comes with the OS.
Give it a try and you'll see.

"On Windows, and macOS, this static function will use the native file dialog and not a QFileDialog."

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.12/qfiledialog.html#getOpenFileName