Copying the Contents of Windows Dialogs
As a developer, I very often see error messages – some of those originate from the products I develop, and I have to report them as bugs. Whenever I get an error message in a dialog, I typically take a screenshot, and add that to the bug base issue. That’s fine, but it means people can’t search for that error message in the bug base – in order to enable that, I’d usually just manually type out the error message, rather than take a screenshot. That was before. Today, I’d just press CTRL+C to copy the error dialog contents.
That’s right, whenever you see a dialog in Windows, like this:
A typical Windows error message dialog.
You can press CTRL+C to copy, and then open up Notepad, and press CTRL+V to paste:
The dialog title, contents, and even the button text are saved to the clipboard.
I had no idea this was possible until I read a Lifehacker article explaining it. Since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it very useful in my every day work. Maybe you will too!
Just a note, though – it doesn’t seem to work everywhere. For example, JavaScript alert dialogs can’t be copied in Firefox, but they can in Internet Explorer.
Applying a Custom Filter in an Open File Dialog
What I’m going to cover now is a pretty minor feature of Windows. I would of skipped this article, but I encountered a few people that never heard of this trick. I’ve personally found it useful in scenarios where I was working with custom file extensions… for example, I knew that a particular file with the uncommon extension “.def” could be opened in Microsoft Access. The file extension “.def” is not typically associated with Microsoft Access, but I knew it was a valid file.
To explain how the feature works, consider your typical, everyday “Open File” dialog:
An example of a typical "Open File" dialog - from uTorrent
In this example, the dialog wants you to select a “.torrent” file by default. Because this is the active filter, you only see files that have a “.torrent” extension in the folders you view. What if you had a file with a “.abc” extension – and you knew it was a valid torrent file, just with a different extension? If you wanted to select it, you’d have to change the filter dropdown to “All Files”, and then find it that way. If you had a lot of files in the same folder as the “.abc” file, you’d have to look through the list to find the one you want.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply filter for “.abc” files, even though the dropdown doesn’t have it as an option? Guess what… you can.
Simply type:
*.abc
in the “File name” textbox, and click press Enter.
This is the result:
Notice how the “.torrent” file is no longer visible? This is because we just applied a custom filter, one that told the dialog to only display the files having an extension of “.abc”. This little trick can be useful when you’re dealing with lots of a files - it can reduce the clutter and make it easy to find something specific.
Here’s an interesting detail: if you take another look at the filter dropdown, as show in the screenshots, you’ll notice that the filter itself is shown in the name of the dropdown choice. Consider the “Torrents” filter from the above screenshot:
Torrents (*.torrent)
The portion within the parentheses (green font) is the filter that Windows is internally applying when you select the dropdown. All we’re really doing by typing the filter directly in the “File name” textbox is bypassing the limited options in the user interface, likely using the same approach as Windows would had the option been available as a dropdown.