Biggest fail on Android IMHO: you cannot paste _within_ a word.
copy and paste should be dedicated soft buttons, at least as long presses.
Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
41–50 of 693 posts
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#42Maybe it's just me, but when dragging the handler, specially on a selection, it often moves after releasing the finger, it's infuriating.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#43Use a keyboard app with arrows. My choice is "Hacker's keyboard" [0] but I think there are others. (Search reddit for best keyboards with arrows.) I can't say more about it, text editing is not a problem on mobile. It's ok. I installed, then I forgot.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#44Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#45I still use Swype, the button to select the word the cursor is at is irreplaceable. No other keyboard I know of has it. There are also more suggestions and you can scroll them. Google's keyboard only shows 3, and two of them are basically the same with different capitalization. It's just horrible. The other benefit is that you can quickly copy/cut/paste/select all with a single swipe action (from the swipe button to…
I don't know why there aren't any good keyboards. SwiftKey came close, but as it grew it became slower and slower and now it's just ossified and abandoned, with a few really annoying bugs that surely should have been easy to fix (like "forget this word" actually forgetting a word).
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#46There 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…
Apple had a solid solution with 3d touch -- press a little bit harder and it was near instant jump to right position/highlight. I felt much faster inputting on my iPhone then. I miss it every day.
Doesn’t this still exist? You Force Touch the space bar and get a cursor
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#47I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch devices. It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices. Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb typing on a screen. Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on letter based inference…
modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart phone user.
But nowadays you can install custom keyboards on every OS that could probably get you most of the way there.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#48Biggest fail on Android IMHO: you cannot paste _within_ a word. copy and paste should be dedicated soft buttons, at least as long presses.
You definitely can with recent GBoard versions. If something is in the clipboard, tapping somewhere (including within a word) to move the cursor brings up a paste button in the prediction bar.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#49Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.
Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
#50Use a keyboard app with arrows. My choice is "Hacker's keyboard" [0] but I think there are others. (Search reddit for best keyboards with arrows.) I can't say more about it, text editing is not a problem on mobile. It's ok. I installed, then I forgot. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
> Hacker's keyboard
My updoots for it. I think it's already a decade I use it exclusively on any Android platform.
Sadly soon enough it would break completely, because Android is constantly mangl^W changing.