Send text in problem reports, not screenshots

These days, users seeking support for a problem often attach a screenshot of a terminal window to show the input/output. That should be discouraged in favour of cut-and-paste from the terminal sessionOr possibly MIME text/ attachments of saved output.

. It should be noted, though, that showing what happens at all is rather better than you often get, sigh, and obviously this doesn’t apply if it is an issue related to graphical output.

There are basically three problems a support muggins may have with a screenshot:

• They may not actually be able to read it (even if they’re not processing mail with a text-mode client — Emacs, I’d suggest);

• They can’t just paste the input somewhere to try it;In a session protected against possible booby traps in user data if you don’t fully trust users, or the report isn’t authenticated.
  
  

• They may not be able to tell what the text actually was, even if the screenshot is legible.

The third point arises because odd errors are quite often due to non-ASCII characters where they shouldn’t be, more-or-less homoglyphs(/homographs) for the correct syntax. You may or may not easily be able to distinguish ASCII quote characters from ‘smart quotes’ in the screenshot, or en dashes ‘–’ perhaps in place of ‘--’. Those are the ones I can remember seeing off-hand, but there are likely others. They perhaps arise from people dealing with text in a word-processor, not a text editor, but it’s sometimes a bit of a mystery.

In contrast, assuming it hasn’t got mangled on the way, you can check cut-and-pasted text. How you do that depends on your tools. In Emacs you want a regexp with the nonascii character class, [[:nonascii:]],Or use my display mode.

but POSIX doesn’t include that, so you may need something different with lesser tools. See also Emacs C-u C-x = for individual characters.