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It doesn’t support desktop modifiers like Ctrl or Shift, but at least you can properly place the cursor where you want without going mad. For some reason, only LineageOS has that feature, and not even every other ROM. I once tried a different ROM and switched back because the feature was missing, horrible.
In place of touch, I'd prefer a new keyboard screen containing a joystick to move the text cursor with. On the opposite side of the keyboard, you could have all the context buttons, together with a 'select' button which can be held while moving the joystick to make a selection. Add a toggle button to the existing keyboard to switch from and to these new input options and you're all set.
Whether this solution is intuitive enough for the average mobile user is up for discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning Solidwork…
There may be fewer desktops, but laptops work the same way and they don't seem to be going away any time soon. I'm not aware of "tons of professional writers, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing" who spend most of their writing time on the type of mobile devices described in this article.
I guess I'm the only one to use SwiftKey keyboard with arrows to move the cursor? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-di... Edit: fixed link
Fix that before literally anything else on Android, please.
> too many people mistakenly see text editing as “done”
I can't imagine anyone that uses both desktop and mobile to think mobile text editing doesn't need improvements.
I wonder if the author is aware of the cursor positioning gestures on iOS (hold space, then drag) I’m also not sure that the inline magnifier is such a good idea, he never gives an example with a fat finger overlaid, I think that would immediately show it’s just not feasible. I’m also sure that Apple has dozens of user tests with all type of text editing strategies, Ken Kocienda even wrote a book about his process de…
He probably is aware, Android has the same gesture.
I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from the middle of words, I think that’s fine. It seems pretty important to have the tests be realistic…
If you put a second finger on the keyboard when you're doing long-press-space, it'll do selection but it'll stop when you lift your finger off space (if you've run out of display when selecting downwards) and won't pick up where you left off - you have to move to the little selection handles instead.
Handy for small selections, I guess?
In practice, I only use the thing to receive SMS messages containing verification codes (which I can't receive on my laptop). The phone doesn't travel with me (i.e. it's not in fact mobile). It stays near the laptop, which also doesn't travel.
My eyesight isn't that great these days. And I have a distinct sense that my fingers and thumbs have got fatter with age; one thumb covers three "buttons" on the virtual keyboard.
You may say that I should get a bigger, more-modern fondleslab. But the buttons on the virtual keyboard are the same size on big fondleslabs as they are on my old one; they keep the keyboard as small as possible, so that app designers have more screen to play with.
There was a company, Tactus, who developed a touch screen that had little physical bumps pop out of the screen to represent your keyboard. I’ve always wondered why it never caught on, but I’m sure the technology came with a host compromises. Anyhow, it always seemed like a neat idea. Perhaps it would even allow for a denser button arrangement, giving users their arrow keys back. In other news, I typed this on my phon…
The other benefit is that you can quickly copy/cut/paste/select all with a single swipe action (from the swipe button to the c, x, v, a keys respectively).
There is just an single downside: no swipe on the space bar to move the cursor. But with another gesture you can turn the keyboard into an arrows one.