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One of the long standing feature requests to add a "copy code" button to questions has been implemented on Stack Overflow. For an example, see this question about beamer on SO to try out the button yourself.

According to a comment by a SE staff member, this can be requested for other SE sites as well.

The suggested procedure is to raise it on the site-specific Meta, and if there is community support then a site moderator can add to notify the Community Manager. Additionally, we are encouraged to leave an answer on the Meta.SE announcement linked above.

There seems to be a demand for this feature on TeX.SE as well. For example:

So the question is: do we want to request this feature to be enabled on TeX.SE or not?

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    I would argue that 9 upvotes on this less-than-3-month-old question should be enough community support for a moderator to status-review this right away Commented Nov 4, 2025 at 23:54
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    I added the [featured] tag earlier, just to ensure that the community has the greatest chance to see this discussion and weigh in. :) Commented Nov 7, 2025 at 17:23
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    Yes please!!!!! Commented Nov 7, 2025 at 19:43
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    YES YES YES YES. Commented Nov 7, 2025 at 20:41
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    Yes Yes Yes, please Commented Nov 7, 2025 at 22:00
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    meta.stackexchange.com/questions/414573/… and meta.stackexchange.com/questions/414573/… Commented Nov 7, 2025 at 22:38
  • @V2Blast is this enough? or are we meant to do something else? Commented Nov 16, 2025 at 23:21
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    @V2Blast Diolch! Thanks! :-) Commented Nov 17, 2025 at 17:44
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    Any progress here? @V2Blast Commented Dec 14, 2025 at 10:29
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    @DavidCarlisle I'm not on the Community Engagement & Enablement subteam, but I'm sure they'll assign and handle this post if they're not already in the process of doing so. Commented Dec 14, 2025 at 15:55
  • 1) Why is this "Copy"-Button not part of the frame of the window wherein code is shown but does scroll away when scrolling the code? 2) Why the forced prepending of three lines of what is intended as commenting but may break things, e.g., when providing filecontents that are to be processed verbatim? Commented Jan 14 at 10:35
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    @UlrichDietz the implementation indeed has some problems, the Meta.SE question linked above also has a lot of answers with criticism similar to yours. However, in most situations it works fine (i.e., easier than manual copy-paste, especially for longer blocks) and for exceptions such as file contents you can still manually select the contents and copy it. The prepended comments are used as attribution, which I think is actually a good thing. Commented Jan 14 at 11:24

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Yes, let's ask the CMs to activate this on TeX SE.

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    plus we don't need language detection: they can assume it is all tex unless explicitly marked o/w :-) Commented Nov 5, 2025 at 2:34
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I've turned this feature on for this site. Apologies for the delay, and thank you for the reminder!

A quick check indicates that this recently-posted question with a code block seems to have it enabled as expected!

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    THANKS A LOT! That's great. Commented Jan 7 at 15:48
  • Awesome! What a useful utility! Commented Jan 7 at 16:24
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No, we should not make any changes to how code is handled.

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    To be clear, I'm in favor of the change (and voted for it). But it seems if the question is "A or B", then we should have the option to vote for "B". Commented Nov 5, 2025 at 1:57

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