A discussion about adding a “select all” button to preformatted text blocks in Discourse. wesochuck proposed the idea, citing difficulties when copying code blocks with horizontal scrolling. sam agreed and suggested a “full screen” option for code blocks. JP_ shared a similar experience and suggested that triple-clicking preformatted text should only highlight the text inside.
Mittineague tested the triple-click feature in different browsers and found it to be browser-dependent. modius later shared a working solution, adding a copy button to code blocks using Ember. The feature was then shared as a custom theme in the #theme category.
The discussion was later updated by amotl, who mentioned that a similar discussion had been created, and by JammyDodger, who announced that the feature is now available in Discourse core and enabled by default.
We’re moving our internal knowledge base over to Discourse and one thing we’re finding difficult is working with the topics that have a lot of code (usually SQL) in them.
We wrap the code blocks using the preformatted text option to preserve link breaks and enable code highlighting, but then when we need to use the code, the copy/paste is a bit cumbersome due to the horizontal scrolling.
I know that adding an actual copy to clipboard button is a bad idea due to security concerns and a requirement for flash, but would it be possible to add a “select” button that would select all the text in a preformatted text box?
This seems like it might be possible to do according to:
Putting the button in the lower right hand corner of the preformatted block seems like a nice way to handle the UI (replace COPY with SELECT in this example):
Sure, I think this would be a cool feature, especially for longer blocks, another one would be “full screen” option for code blocks, which makes reading large code blocks way easier.
Came here looking to see if this was possible. Would be super useful. Wanted to paste a webcal link, which is a long single line. The scrollbar is nice for formatting but it also made copying more difficult so instead I opted for quoting it.
I think so, I tried using more of my other browsers.
IE11 and Opera 12 - same as Firefox
Chrome and Vivaldi - same as what you posted.
I also noticed when I triple clicked in your post what I previously “gif-ified” it looks like another row or maybe padding appears below the text, but … *
Apologies for resurrecting such an old thread.. but I thought others might be interested in a working solution. We recently cracked our last hurdle getting it all to work with Ember by running on post cooked rather than DOM ready.
