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Comment by Twisell | Hacker News Reader

> But the ease of use and selection capability has been greatly reduced. You can still select text but it takes two hands (or fingers?) and I can’t seem to figure out how it delineates its boundaries so I end up never using it.

Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.

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Could you explain further how to do it? I still don't get it :( I always just double-tap a word to select it and then drag the selection tabs to expand to what I want. If there's another way I'm interested to hear it.

Hold spacebar to start the cursor. Use 2nd finger tap on the keyboard, the selection markers will show up. Now use the first finger again to move left/right to select stuff.

First time trying it for me but it seems.. odd, maybe need to get used to it.

The thing that trips me is that I need my initial finger to move about, I instinctively moved my second finger to move the second (selection) cursor.

Ahh, thanks. Selecting that way is so janky for me that I wonder if it's not actually a bug. I tried a number of times and it behaves really weirdly / unpredictably.

Seconded. I don't understand what they meant by two hands/fingers.

When you have activated the cursor move function by long-pressing the space bar, while still pressing the screen, tap another finger on the screen to move into selection mode.

The prior mention of defining the start and end points of the selection is a bit more tricky and may not even be an actual feature, which involves moving the cursor around in a kind of handoff between start and stop point. That’s trickier to describe because it fellas like it may just be a quirky behavior that can be manipulated.

Same! I only just upgraded phones a couple weeks ago and the lack of 3D Touch was confounding when I made text errors! I didn’t know I could activate it with the spacebar but that works pretty well!

It took me forever to learn how to select text again. I feel like Apple really kind of damaged itself by hiding things, not telling anyone properly, and then removing things because no one was using it because they had no idea it was there. It’s such a typical asinine corporate/communist/top down/command structure problem. problem

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