Pathing in the D ecosystem is generally broken (at least on windows)

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 03:33:20 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 9/28/2015 6:42 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Monday, 28 September 2015 at 23:44:55 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>>> On 9/28/2015 2:41 PM, rumbu wrote:
>>>> Pressing Ctrl-C in any *standard* dialog will copy the text 
>>>> to clipboard since
>>>> Windows 2000, even captions and buttons.
>>>
>>> Nope. Doesn't work in the Environment Variables dialog box. 
>>> Doesn't work in
>>> the Thunderbird about box. Doesn't work in the Notepad about 
>>> box. Doesn't work
>>> in the IE about box. Or any of the IE dialog boxes I tried, 
>>> like Internet
>>> Options.
>>>
>>> I haven't found ANY where it works.
>>
>> Hmmm. I'm don't know what you're doing differently from the 
>> rest of us.
>> Certainly, the text in about boxes isn't usually selectable, 
>> but aren't we
>> specifically talking about the dialog for editing environment 
>> variables here? If
>> I open the environment variable dialog, select Path, and click 
>> on the edit
>> button,
>
> Try selecting any text in the dialog box before opening another 
> one with the edit button. Or try any of the ones I mentioned.

Well, I would have thought that it was clearly designed with the 
idea that you'd click on the edit button to edit it. And you can 
copy and paste the data from the edit dialog. So, not being able 
to edit the fields in the first dialog really isn't a big deal 
IMHO, though what they give you with the edit dialog really isn't 
any better than simply being able to edit it in the initial 
dialog. So, in that sense, maybe they should have just made it 
editable in the first dialog rather than having to open one 
specifically to edit it, though it would be far better to 
actually make the edit dialog sane rather than just a simple text 
box. Fortunately though, it sounds like the edit dialog is 
finally becoming sane with Windows 10.

> > And I can now edit that text and copy it back into the edit
> field for the Path variable, which is stupid to have to do but 
> is a lot saner than editing the text in the edit box directly.
>
> Surely a dialog box stinks if you have to paste its contents 
> into an editor to edit it.

Well, of course, it sucks. Having the PATH be edited via a single 
text field isn't even vaguely user friendly. Copy-pasting to edit 
it just a way to make it slightly more sane. What it really needs 
is to be revamped in a manner similar to what they've apparently 
finally done with Windows 10.

- Jonathan M Davis