Soupspoon wrote:Regardless of anything else, there are a number of things about
Dropbox's apparent default behaviour that I don't like... *shudder*
(And
that was the problem. Rather than the expected image to copypasta, it turned out to be a text link... Except it originally wasn't linked to
Ctrl-(Alt-)PrintScreen, just straight (Alt-)PrintScreen..)
What? No, the Ctrl+PrintScreen behavior described is both useless and not current, as public links don't work that way in Dropbox anymore and why the fuck would you want to spam your clipboard anyway. It's the basic PrintScreen functionality I'm talking about. Pictured at the top of the page is in fact the opt in window that asks you if you want Dropbox to take over managing screenshots because Windows is terrible at it, confirming that there is in fact nothing about this behavior that is "default"; anyone complaining clicked through that window without reading it.
orthogon wrote:Looking for things in the file system is by far the biggest time waster in using Windows, despite continual introduction of new features: search, recently used, libraries, etc. Partly it's that these features are buggy (search is slow or inexplicably blind to certain locations; recently used lists seem to get added to only when you load, not when you save...), and partly it's that the dynamic nature means that you don't know where (if anywhere) the thing you want is going to appear each time, so ironically you have to do a manual search of the results. Maybe gnome does it better, but for me Linux is the very definition of "you just have to know where this goes in the file system [in this release]".
In the proposed screenshot workflow, all of this is irrelevant, because it still requires opening up MS Paint and Ctrl+Ving into the darkness, and the screenshot folder would be a known and easy to get to location (in the case of Windows with Dropbox, Dropbox / Screenshots.)
Windows Explorer
is an awful file manager, but it does the very basics. I can understand why it might drive Windows users to be scared of the filesystem.
In GNOME, you would indeed need to know at least where your file was, or a part of the name (since typing any random thing into the file manager instantly searches recursively for matches.) There isn't a "Libraries" function to let you know where your suggested, related, and top-rated files are and which files are trending this week. (Unless you count the "recents" category, which opens instantly like everything else but isn't populated by actions from all apps and is therefore useless.)
So it seems that there's something missing in the whole desktop metaphor, the idea that something you just used, saved or produced should be right there in your hand.
It's called the notification area. GNOME's ahead of Windows in chasing Android on this front, but only by a little, Windows apps are doing good things on this front.
The copy buffer is the closest we get to that, but in my view it needs to be extended - you need to have a super-accessible pair (or more) of virtual hands.
It's called a clipboard manager.
It is possible that the pastebuffer method here was at one time meant to solve a problem that existed in the system that inflicted it on the world. If the clipboard somehow enabled you to view and save the screenshot from wherever without loading anything, it'd actually begin to solve the perceived problem in a sense, too, instead of creating more of them. But that problem does not presently exist and appropriate solutions do if it did. See Android, where taking a screenshot puts a link to the file in your notification tray. I don't remember whether Windows / Dropbox does this, too.
And between this and password managers, I'm sick to death of things fucking with the clipboard. Things like this are the reason why people don't use clipboard managers. Because there's always something fucking with the clipboard instead of letting it be a goddamn clipboard.
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.
she / her / her