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Just Let Me Select Text
(aartaka.me)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Programming
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Disable
user-select: none;(and variants) onbodyto be able to select text again. I like the idea of a blog post that calls out something annoying and demonstrates the annoyance inline, thoughI have a bookmarklet to enable text selection on any web page that tries to block it that way.
Here it is for your convenience. Bookmark it and give a try on the linked blog post:
javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);Can't remember where I swiped that from. Probably some ancient StackOverflow thread.
WTF‽ I’m a web dev for 5 years, 8 if you count university, and I’ve never heard about bookmarklets. Why would that even begin to work?
Man, this is so amazing!
Browsers have supported the
javascript:scheme for a long time, so I guess it just abuses that.It's just running some JavaScript code on the page
We run one for our product and it's been teetering on the edge of extinction for a while. Google keeps saying they're going to kill them and going back on the decision
I think its part of the joke ;)