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Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

Url editing on iphone safari is highly messed up experience ... the text selection and editing behavior is just broken since ios 12 or 11 -- whichever one introduced the new text selection model ...

My standard easy repro -- go to a long url and try to edit the second to last segment of the url path (something which i do for work frequently when folks send me links to projects under development).

Enjoy the frustration.

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Am I going crazy, or did this change recently to become even worse? I know before it was pointless to even try to click into the middle of a URL, so my standard procedure was to click past the end to get a cursor and drag back to where I wanted to edit. But recently it changed so now that's impossible: if I click past the end of the URL, even if I'm very careful to avoid the Ⓧ it still just deletes the entire URL! Now I have to click the URL itself to select the entire thing and then drag the starting selection marker to the end. It's a small change but infuriating after years of the old habit.

How could something so basic be so broken? You could put a completely logic free html input there and it would be a better experience.

Works fine for me. I just long press on the keyboard to get into cursor edit mode and swipe along until I get to where I want.

Nice, thanks! Now that you remind me I’m sure I’ve seen that move before, but forgot about it and have been frustrated when editing urls every day since. I think this is the worst thing about using an iPhone for me and probably a lot of other users. Here is the full incantation to get it to work:

1. Touch the address bar and the keyboard will appear.

2. Long press on the spacebar (other parts of the keyboard won’t do it) until a cursor appears in the address bar.

3. Without lifting your finger after the long press, start dragging your finger left and right. The cursor will move.

Maybe writing that out will help me remember. If only there was some affordance in the ui indicating this common use is supported.

This is better than what I've been doing ...

But I find the experience of the cursor navigation by long-press on keyboard quite odd still ... if you stay in the mode for awhile -- and try sliding back and forth its quite an odd experience as it feels like the algorithm behind the cursor motion and its relationship to scrolling becomes less clear over time rather than more understood ...

Maybe there is something wrong with my touchscreen ... I can't figure out how to get the soft keyboard to scroll the cursor position reliably past the viewable area -- sometimes it does scroll and sometimes it doesn't and its a bit of a mystery to me what the intended motion input into the device is that will meet my desires ...

seems like maybe the panning speed needs to be proportional to the fingers vertical height in the keyboard or something -- no panning up top, and fast panning below

It seems that if the cursor won’t go right as far as you want, it helps to move your finger all the way left for a while, then try moving it right again (and vice versa). But that doesn’t always work so it doesn’t fully describe the mechanic. Performing this basic function feels like learning a fighting game. You need to charge up you cursor-moving mana.

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