Live data from Hacker News

Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

jenson.org

491–500 of 693 posts

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#491
I use my phone extensively for writing and I must say I dont experience that much hassle in writing. Only two points:

1. The autocorrect is the worst part and the only real struggle as it often change the word not logically with the previous words (softkey) or it doesn't know the correct conjugation and changes it. Finally, the menu shortcut is way too close to the letter 'a' and I can't stop hitting it.

2. On the ergonomy side, only 'select text' is problematic for me, but not the long press + cursors, that's okay, it's more about cursors themselves when they reach the edges of the screen when I select whole paragraphs. I often find that I can't select the first letters. Therefore, I always need to select some letters from the paragraph above and remove, or select less and rewrite.. Another problem with it is selecting very big chunks of text, I would love a click somewhere + 'shift' click elsewhere to select all the text. Finally, the 'Semantic' web doesn't help sometimes when I can't select several paragraphs because they are not in the same Semantic unit.

I the past I was carrying with me a small Bluetooth keyboard that could switch with a button between my phone and my tablet, but finally, writing on the phone was good enough.

I have way less good experiences with writing code on the phone or interacting with a ssh session.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#492

People produce less text with more errors in more time on mobile. I actively avoid having to type anything on mobile. If I have my laptop open, I'll use whatsapp or signal on that. I often wait replying on either of those until I get my laptop. Just way less frustrating to not have to correct >25% of my key presses. If I have to use the mobile keyboard, I'll often just send a message with typos, no capitals, and skip…

It was much better when you could get phones with physical keyboards. Only recently has swipe on android gotten to the accuracy of typing on a physical phone keyboard, but not the accuracy.

But, that was lost because of the iphonification of the whole smart phone sector.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#493

I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is a huge attention suck and kills my input speed On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain while we're griping: - on an older android device the bu…

I think autocorrect is overrated and actually makes the typing process much more annoying. Also I’m not sure if 55wpm is supposed to be fast or not? I just did a typing test (monkeytype.com) on my iPhone and got 80 wpm with 0 mistakes, and I don’t use autocorrect.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On an iPhone if you hold the space bar down the whole keyboard becomes a kind of trackpad which you can use to move the cursor. Since all the keys disappear, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select text or paste in a specific spot in that “mode”. Right now it’s so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.

You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did not have to wait for the long press to register.

What do you mean "tap somewhere else on the Keyboard?" Once I hold down the space bar and then let go, the keyboard disappears. And I just tried some combination of this and got into a frozen state where the keyboard was missing and I had to kill Safari.

EDIT: Oh, I need to use a second finger. Cool.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#497
post #349

The vast difference in editing things on a MicroPC with its touchpad and physical keyboard versus a phone is immense . I'm pretty sure I can legitimately type faster and usually navigate UIs faster on a capacitive touch phone, but the frustration of typing and targeting the cursor is unbelievable even after having used smartphones for over a decade now. It's just bad. It is amusing that it's hard to convince people t…

Every time I pick up my pinephone I feel immense disappointment in what forms of interaction most devices are stuck with today, despite how easily alternatives can be implemented in an open platform as the pinephone has shown. But for just editing text, I find vim and emacs surprisingly usable with a touch keyboard, as long as numbers and needed symbols and modifiers are on the base layer.

Precise pointing / fat fingering is solvable for text editing and in general by using the touchscreen for relative input - like a touchpad. That's possible on the pinephone with a userland program that directly interfaces with evdev and uinput in a really simple way[1], taking the ability to run desktop software well beyond being a party trick. All it's missing is a scheme where single, double, or two-finger taps and drags are either relative or absolute to avoid having to switch modes. Or, because the touchscreen, like most, reports touch area, one might have a go at cloning force touch.

[1] https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator

For swipe input, wvkbd[2] has experimental support that works amusingly well for how sucklessly it's implemented (see the readme), albeit only for long words or reduced dictionaries - so many possibilities, like having zsh write completions to a file. It does need a patch to not interfere with normal typing. Spacebar swiping would also be straightforward to patch (or on sxmo into lisgd instead*). Alternatively, a small key could receive a 4-way swipe gesture like the trackpoint that Windows 10 Mobile had. (btw, hey, the MessageEase patent expired...)

[2] https://git.sr.ht/~proycon/wvkbd

* I don't know how the devs tolerate the latency that sxmo_inputhandler.sh brings - handling basic OS shell gestures in a long shell script on a platform where every expansion piped to grep causes a noticeable increase in latency is very unsuckless!

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#498
post #467

This is absolutely a problem, but I'm not convinced the author has found a solution. I'd have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky. I believe touch screens are fundamentally a bad interface for productivity. Consider the range of actions provided by a mouse: You can hover without clicking, you can left click, or you can right click, all with nearly pixel-level precision. Add i…

3D touch solves some problems for touch interfaces, but sadly Apple killed it (everywhere except Magic Trackpad, for some reason).

It never worked though. It would just pop in randomly at unexpected times. It sucked.

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#499
post #2

- Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile" - Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer practical - "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward." Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile" is pioneering is bad.

>My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward."

>> Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience

How would "mov[ing] mobile forward" privilege mobile?

How would it impair your experience on your desktop?

Re: Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

#500
post #2

- Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile" - Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer practical - "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward." Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile" is pioneering is bad.

>My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward." >> Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience How would "mov[ing] mobile forward" privilege mobile? How would it impair your experience on your desktop?

The implication is clear from the wording. Desktop is "back", mobile is "forward".
Post reply on HN