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

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/29/2015 6:51 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday, 29 September 2015 at 23:50:34 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Really, what's the case for not supporting this? Am I really a unique snowflake?
>
> No, you're alone, though it's not something that I think about often. I think
> that most of us run into this sort of problem from time to time (e.g. for some
> reason, the VPN client that I use for work won't let you copy-paste the IP
> address that you're connected to, so you have to read it and type it out by hand
> every time that you need to give it to someone, which is just silly). But there
> are aspects of GUIs where I don't think that it's really reasonable to expect to
> be able to copy the text, because it would interfere with how the GUI works
> (e.g. the text on a button). So, I _expect_ there to be times when I can't copy
> a piece text from a GUI.

I should be able to copy the button text by starting the stroke from outside the 
button and crossing over it.


> However, that being said, I don't think that there's any question that more text
> should be selectable and copyable than is. It looks like KDE made is that you
> can select the text in their about boxes. I have no idea why Microsoft didn't.
> And it's just plain embarrassing that Microsoft wouldn't let you copy error
> messages from error dialogs. But I think that it mostly comes down to the folks
> who put GUIs together not thinking about this sort of thing. It really isn't
> related to the primary functionality of an application, so it's easy to forget.
> And in many cases, I expect that it comes down to exactly what kind of GUI
> widget was used to display the text, and if the toolkit in question wasn't
> designed with this in mind, then everyone using it is going to end up with
> unselectable and uncopyable text in their GUIs - which just goes to show, I
> suppose, that if the GUI toolkit folks get it right, then a lot of programs
> will, and I guess that Win32 or MFC or whatever C# thing Microsoft and many
> other Windows shops use for many of their GUIs don't do it right.

Microsoft should:
1. fix it so it is the default behavior.
2. list it in their guidelines for how dialog boxes should work.