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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Text selection is the most broken thing to me on an ipad. It makes any kind of editing pretty much unusable. Great device to browse the web from my bathtub and watch movies on a plane, but haven’t found any other usage.

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My favorite pet peeve is trying to edit URLs in the address bar in Safari. Just trying to get the cursor to the end of the address field a an error prone chore. Often the text is select and there’s no way to unselect it. Then of course it doesn’t help when you want to remove some components of the URL that Safari helpfully autocompletes back to the URL you jus visited.

Force touching on the keyboard gives your finger control over the cursor more like a touch pad on a computer. It works really well on the iPhone, not sure if it's available on iPad. But yet again, one of those feature you just have to know about to use.

It was never available on iPad, and is no longer on newer iPhones. It's replaced by a long touch, but this cursor control function has disappeared.

Long touch the space bar in the keyboard to get the trackpad-like functionality back.

Thank goodness it's still around! Yet once again, no way of knowing that feature is there without being told.

Thank you. I had trouble activating this feature. On iOS it seems to work anywhere on the keyboard, not limited to a particular key.

Two-finger touch anywhere on the keyboard also turns it on, though I usually find that pretty awkward.

It is on iPad, two-finger touch the scroll bar and it does it.

I hate how utterly undiscoverable stuff like this is. I use the force touch trackpad on my iPhone constantly and always wished it existed on the iPad.

Yep, for all the pride they take in the "it just works" and their "simpler" UI, they certainly love to hide useful features and just not tell you about them upfront.

Yeah, you can read and play around with the phone to learn but something simple like cursor and text adjustment should be priority no. 1 in terms of alerting the user that a function actually exists.

It doesn't work well either. If the cursor is already selecting a span of text it can be hard to return it to a single movable cursor and the two finger drag on spacebar thing will just move around the multiselection in a broken way. There is probably some other secret shortcut to toggle, tapping in the text or double tapping just seems to do things at random and rarely gives back a single cursor.

I am actually kind of annoyed they removed the force touch on newer iphones. I used it so often on my keyboard.

The tradeoff was a 4-hour longer battery so there was probably more gained than lost there but the usable area to move the cursor shrunk considerably (to a long touch on the spacebar only) and makes it harder to use.

Use three fingers on keyboard for same effect on devices without force touch.

Doesn’t work on an iPad, which is where I want the feature the most. Also, force touch is no fine in newer model phones (because they screwed up the implementation in my opinion).

The same thing works on an iPad or phones without Force Touch, you just need to start the gesture from the space bar. Long-press the space bar and now you can move the cursor anywhere by dragging.

Yes, hidden and undiscoverable gestures are a problem.

This is one of the reasons I don't understand why there are so many iPhone/iOS fanboys... are they actually never experiencing these kind of frustrating bits of iOS or are they just ignoring them? Because I experience them all the time. Only reason I haven't switched back to Android (yet) is that I love the form factor of the iPhone SE.

I felt this rather acutely at work where I was strongarmed into giving up my Linux desktop for a MacBook. When I ask how a Mac-loving coworker solved a OS problem, I'm met with blank stares as if they've never recognized it as a drawback, let alone wished for a solution. Multi-monitor support is a particular pain point for me; there just seems to be so much missing and I can't understand why.

I'm using multi-monitor (3 monitors) setup with my Mac for a long period of time (more than 5 years). What problems do you encounter, maybe I can help you to solve them.

Two fingers on the keyboard, it turns into a cursor control. You're welcome :)

That does not work for me on iOS 13.3.

Even with a tap and hold? It should make the letters go away. Works juyst fine on 13.3 on my Pro 10.5

Tap and hold works, two fingers does nothing though.

This is so much worse as of ios13 - which was somehow meant to make text selection better, but for me made it so much less consistent.

I really feel like this should be a solvable problem though. It can’t be that complicated to select text reliably.

This has been such a pet hate for years on systems with a mouse as well as iPhone iOS, that I assume it is nigh impossible to select text reliably and conveniently, for some unexplored reason or other. It's always the case that I can get a selection backwards up to the first letter but missing it, or including the first letter and some extra junk from the lines before, but not simply up to and including the first letter.

Right now replying to your comment on Windows, FireFox, with a mouse, I have just discovered a new text selection mode I've never noticed before[1] - double-click-and-drag selects whole words. Consistently up to the new word boundary on the right. That means it's possible to select an entire sentence up to (but without) the period. Or including the period and a trailing space. But not the obvious one to want - a sentence including the period and no trailing space.

[1] I know double-click commonly selects words, and triple-click selects sentences, but didn't know of double-click-drag.

Just checked and it works on MacOS too. Thank you, what a game-changer!

Agreed — moving the cursor and selecting text has become almost unusable for me on iOS 13 [1]. It's a shame, because I always used to be impressed at how easy and natural it felt. I really hope they figure this out and reinstate the old approach.

[1] As I was saying only the other day: https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1221038674193932288

This could actually be a valid reason to jailbreak my iPhone (the last time I did so was 10 years ago). Does anyone know if there are any tweaks that would bring back the old pre-iOS13 behaviour?

I just learned the spacebar trick a few months ago.

I still get “5e” instead of “the” about twice a month. And once in a while I will be typing and four words to half a sentence will just disappear and I still have no idea how I’m doing that.

A whole new text entry system wouldn’t go amiss for me, either.

But try selecting text from a web page...

For me, a chunk of text would go missing because it interprets fast typing as double, triple, quadruple tapping. Which means the text is selected and then promptly overwritten. The solution is to be deliberate about typing slowly on the screen keyboard. https://www.howtogeek.com/441872/how-to-use-text-editing-ges...

It would be nice if they fixed the autocorrect learning insane things like correcting “male” to “Male” and “doesn’t” to “DOESNT”, so I wouldn’t have to do so much text selection to fix it. My iPhone which is really behind on iOS versions doesn’t do this but my iPad is awful for it.

Autocorrect on the iOS from four years ago was nothing short of magic. It would understand the most confused babble and rarely needed any guidance. It even seemed to get used to my style of typing after a while. Today, it is a constant battle. It keeps trying to rope in my address book, different languages I’m not typing in, and arcane words. I correct it every four sentences at least.

I thought I wanted these features; boy was I wrong.

> And once in a while I will be typing and four words to half a sentence will just disappear and I still have no idea how I’m doing that

I don't edit text on the iPad for exactly that reason. As soon as I start typing fast using the screen keyboard, I keep losing stuff

Not Just broken on ipads, pretty much every touch based system out there has horrible UI to select text...

It is fantastic for creating artwork, if you are artistic.

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