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Braiam
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Why do people post screenshots of their terminals?

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 a 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 i'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?

terdon
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