No need to retype manually. If you upload a screenshot of the error to ChatGPT, it will transcribe it for you and even give you some hints on how to resolve it.

Have you tried? CTRL+C on most dialogs will copy all of the text to clipboard. Of course, there are 3rd party dialogs that are not standard Windows dialogs and they do not implement this functionality.

To be fair, it's quite a hidden feature. I've used Windows as a daily driver since 3.1 days, and I didn't discover this until late Windows XP or early Windows 7 days.

Not dialogs, but you certainly can’t copy errors/warnings from Visual Studio inline popups, which is super annoying when I occasionally develop a Windows app in Visual Studio.

So literally today i tried to install sql server developer edition, and for some reason the downloaded file was corrupted. The error msg wasn't "ctrl-c"-able, so i had to retype whatever nonsense shown on the screen.

That was Microsoft's database, from Microsoft's website, to be installed on a Microsoft's OS.

CTRL-C will copy the entire text to the clipboard for standard message boxes.

Maddening isn't it? One work around is to install MS Powertoys, then Win Shift T will give you a rectangle to capture text from anywhere on the screen, including an image then it will convert it and put it in the clipboard for you. Not perfect, it tends to confuse Capital O with the number 0, but it's better than nothing.

The why part is harder. My theory is Windows is made of many shells of of code, and they older parts of the system will never be refactored. I think someone counted 5 different gui interfaces in Win 11.

To be fair, MS is handcuffed by backwards compatibility. So interfaces remain frozen in time because changing anything can break compatibility in ways impossible to predict.

Fun Fact: File Explorer can keep changing because they never promised anyone they would keep it compatible with anything.

Edit: Just to say I did comment on the linked article, I never dreamed I would ever read the words "use PowerShell to create a nice GUI".

No workaround needed. CTRL+C will copy the text.

Sometimes. (Excel is a famous example).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-ext... will OCR/copy any text in a region of the screen you select

Yeah its maddening, its also an ubiquitous problem, in Android sometimes I need to copy a file name from the Google photos app, surprise surprise: Tapping the file name does nothing, the quick dirty solution its to screenshot it, use Google lens on such screenshot and from there I can select the text.

There's a bunch of different UI frameworks, but WPF is pretty popular, and in WPF, my understanding is the normal control you'd use to just slap text on the screen is TextBlock. And a WPF TextBlock doesn't have any way to make the text selectable. And if text isn't selectable, you don't get the normal affordances of the window manager's copy functions.

I've used Avalonia, which is based on WPF. Its TextBlock control works the same way, which means the default way to put text on the screen is inaccessible. But if the programmer is thinking about it, they could use SelectableTextBlock instead, and then the text is available to the user for selecting and copying.