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Comment by valine | Hacker News Reader

Text selection on iPad has been royal pain since iOS 6 (if I’m remembering correctly), and Apple has done absolutely nothing to remedy the situation since. You tap hold once to select a word, then you drag this tiny blue dot as it glitches out and jumps to a random spot on the screen every time you move your finger. It’s insanity, and I can’t believe Apple went another year without fixing it in iOS 11.

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Text selection on inside a textarea is pretty easy on the iPad and iPhone if you are using the on-screen keyboards. On the iPhone you can use force-touch on the keyboard area and then move the cursor wherever you wish. Force-pressing again starts a selection. On the iPad you use two fingers to drag across the on-screen keyboard and tap with two fingers begin selecting, which doesn‘t really work if you are using a hardware keyboard. So it‘s a mixed bag.

I just learned the two-finger drag last week and it's a game changer.

I really need to spend some time sitting through the iOS tutorials to see what other functionality I'm missing out on.

This has the common newer era iOS issue though of, yea it works pretty good but it completely fails the "will you figure it out on your own" test. Someone had to show me, and all my friends had no idea it was even a thing.

The old selection method is still terrible and needs to be revamped

This only works for text you're editing. Selecting text on a webpage or anywhere the keyboard isn't available is still painful.

A thousand times yes! I have to back this up sentiment 100%. Text selection on an iPad for mousers like myself is so frustrating that it's absolutely a show stopper.

I understand that there are lots of gesture/touch target reasons for the current infuriating, knob-based interface, but I tried to switch to an iPad for full-time long form writing and just couldn't. Basic text entry is okay, but doing any sort of serious editing, i.e. selecting and moving a sentence somewhere else in a paragraph is just pure torture. Life is too short.

I am really surprised this isn't mentioned more in iPad reviews, especially since the reviewers are (kinda) long form writers! Maybe they are writing their iPad reviews on a laptop?

You can double tap and drag to immediately to start a selection with your finger. So if I wanted to select [this sentence] I would double tap on [this] and keep my finger down on the second tap, then drag over [sentence]. You can keep dragging to select a whole block.

I haven't seen this feature mentioned anywhere but I just discovered it one day for the same reason you are annoyed. The feature works on iPhones and iPads alike.

Probably because it's basically the same experience on Android.

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