Copy code-blocks from Stack Exchange websites

Question

About

Highlighting and copying code from questions/answers is not as straightforward as one hopes it'd be. Throughout the years, there were (at least) a couple of userscripts/extensions to address this need. However, they are not maintained and the links are dead.

I have found this gist by kpym to be still functional, however it could've used a facelift.

This userscript (written off of the linked gist) adds a copy button to the top right corner of code blocks to copy the code from questions and answers.

Dark mode:

Light mode:

Installation

Click to install with a script manager. N.B. I have only tested this with Tampermonkey on Firefox.

Repository

Here is the source code for this userscript; source code repo

Update: Copying code from code blocks is now a native feature, albeit currently only on Stack Overflow. See this MSE announcement for details: Results of the October 2025 Community Asks Sprint: copy button for code blocks, and more — V2Blast
– V2Blast Staff♦, Commented Nov 4 at 18:37
@V2Blast thank you for the link. I will wait to see how the new feature goes before marking this one as obsolete. There are a bunch of bugs already: chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/58335276#58335276 — M--
– M--, Commented Nov 4 at 18:40
This feature's also currently only on SO, so the script may still remain useful for other sites that have code blocks. — V2Blast
– V2Blast Staff♦, Commented Nov 4 at 23:57

M-- · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-05 20:40:45Z

Following introduction of a copy button (with attribution) for code blocks on Stack Overflow, I've updated this userscript to offer a superior (imo), cross-site experience.

The advantages of having this script installed:

Works on all Stack Exchange websites (not just Stack Overflow)
Guaranteed plain-text attribution. The official SO feature often incorrectly guesses the programming language and comments out the attribution with the wrong syntax (see the relevant bug report), creating extra work. This script provides the attribution as plain text, letting you decide how to comment it out
Gives the right attribution (i.e. link to the post, author's name, date of retrieval, and license info) for all posts (regular Q&A's, community wikis, posts by deleted users, etc.)
The copy button only appears on hover (unlike SO's feature), saving screen space. It cleanly overrides (removes) the default Stack Overflow copy button

Click to install the updated version with a script manager. Note: I have only tested this with Tampermonkey on Firefox.

Thank you for this! Somewhat ironically, I've found this very useful as a way to get rid of the official space wasting implementation. — val - disappointed in SE
– val - disappointed in SE, Commented 2 days ago

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Copy code-blocks from Stack Exchange websites

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