Why do people post screenshots of their terminals?

Question

I have noticed a lot of posts on AU with screenshots of their terminal showing commands and their output. This is seems like a very bad idea to me because:

1. You can't copy/paste the commands
2. They won't come up when searching
3. The post is heavier (in terms of the amount of data) and will take longer to load. This can be a serious problem for people with slow connections.
4. The post is useless to people using text based browsers or who have disabled the displaying of images
5. The post is useless for people who have sight problems and are maybe accessing the site using text-to-speech software.

While there are sometimes valid reasons for this (discussing colored output, or terminal emulator transparency or whatever), in most cases it is not useful and causes the problems listed above. In addition, it is harder to do. Copy pasting your terminal text and putting it inside a code block is much simpler and faster.

So, is this policy on AU? Has the community decided that it prefers images over text? If so, where's the meta post so I can vote it down? If it's not an 'official' policy, could we please try not to do this and only post images of our terminals if it is absolutely necessary to make our point?

Answer 1

So, is this a policy on AU? Has the community decided that it prefers images over text?

Of course not. Everything you've said is true in most cases. I'm certain there are some cases where a screenshot does make an amount of sense (illustrations to demonstrate a command's coloured output for example) but when we're talking about things that a user might want to actually read, stick with text.

I'm fairly sure we'd arrived at that idea a few years ago. I can't find it but even having a site policy does not translate into everybody following aforementioned site policy.

If you see a post like that, flag, comment vote and edit them until they're showing the right thing.

Answer 2

I agree with Oli, that this behaviour isn't policy nor should it be. In fact it should be discouraged for the very reasons you list.

When I come across dialogue text or terminal or file listings posted as an image¹ I usually post this blurb below it:

Could you please post text files, dialogue messages, and program output listings as text, not as images? To achieve the latter two you can either 1) select, copy & paste the dialogue text or terminal content or 2) save the program output to a file and use that. Excessively long listings (the editor will tell you when it's too long) should be uploaded to a pastie service and linked to in the question. Thanks.

Occasionally I come across authors who dispute the merit of text over images (variations of “But it's easier for me to take a photo of the screen with my phone”, “This is my question and you can't tell me what to do!”) which I try to defuse with an argument why it's in their and everybody's interest to use text:

Images of text have multiple drawbacks over actual text: 1) you can’t copy and paste it easily making it harder for readers to look up error messages and provide support, 2) it’s not searchable or indexable by search engines, 3) it’s inaccessible to the visually impaired, 4) it’s inaccessible without a graphical user interface. Aside from special situations where text colour or formatting need to be preserved or when it’s difficult or impossible to copy and paste the source text there is no reason at all to use images of text instead of text. Even in those cases you can often provide both.

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¹ except boot screen stuff – that's a bit difficult to capture otherwise.