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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

Recently moved from android to an iPhone. The one that gets me while typing: I can’t tap and place the cursor in the middle of a word! Say you mistype a word, you cannot edit that word. You have to delete the entire word or tap and hold to get highlighting and then drag the highlight together to cover one letter on the word and then you can delete and get your cursor in the middle of the word. Insane.

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Press and hold on the spacebar. Wait a second. Then you can move the cursor left/right from the spacebar.

iOS is generally quite good at these things. Like any new platform, you can't expect it the UX to be identical to an old platform that you're more familiar with.

But if the UX is objectively worse, requiring additional unnecessary steps, it’s super annoying.

that's subjective. It's not an additional step, it's a different way of doing it. I personally feel like it's better. I dont have to worry about not placing the cursor at the right place. I just click it and move the cursor around where I want.

I think my gripes so far are around discoverability. How did you know to click and hold the space bar? Now that I know, I like it. Never would have know otherwise. Drag from the bottom left and up to dismiss an app, do the same but go sideways to get to history of apps, etc.

They have most of this in onboarding tips as well as the Tips app.

Not sure what to tell you. I did not dismiss any tips that I can recall. I recall how to create folders and drag apps to it from onboarding. Mostly, I have to ask someone or search Google to find out how to do the most basic of things.

Thanks. It’s a shame they couldn’t display left and right arrows if you click into the middle of the previously entered text, though.

Wow, thanks. I had no idea this was a thing. How did you discover this?

Is there a similar trick for selecting text? What about selecting text from another source like an email or website?

That’s not a bug. It’s worse: it used to work the way you describe but that functionality was removed.

Next time: tap the cursor and hold. You’ll see it get bigger and you can drag it where you want.

Yep, this is an iOS 13 feature. Prior to this, hard-pressing the space bar was the correct solution (although it still works on devices with 3D Touch, and long-touch works on newer models).

Before that we had the magnifying glass, but I guess that wasn’t considered “good UX”.

there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.

ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...

i would really love for someone to fix this issue

-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?

tap/hold spacebar then drag.

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