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Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem

• every 3y ago
  I find text editing on mobile to be like tap dancing on bowling pins...
• sombragris 3y ago
  why don't they put sliding keyboards in cellphones just like the Nokia N900?
• leduyquang753 3y ago
  > We used the barometric pressure sensor in the phone to detect when the user pressed. My phone doesn't have such a sensor, so this wouldn't work.
• xnx 3y ago
  Too much effort has been invested on folding screens when people would probably be more happy with a keyboard phone case and better OS support.
• phreack 3y ago
  > Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?” These people must have never used a phone. This article hits 100%, there's quite a lot of these micro-issues on things we use constantly that could be major differentiators and extremely easy sells, but no one implements. My very personal pet peeve is text reflow on mobile browsers. Just zooming into a long paragraph and having it wrap so you only have to scroll vertically and never horizontally to read it. It's a killer feature and almost no browsers have it!
  • jakub_g 3y ago
    Opera Android supports reflow FWIW. Needs to be enabled in settings (appearance > accessibility)
    • phreack 3y ago
      Yes! I'd rather not use it because it doesn't support uBlock but it's a feature I can't browse without. I try every other browser at least once every year and they're all massively uncomfortable.
• _HMCB_ 3y ago
  iOS 17 improves text selection on many fronts, even in edit mode. Try it.
• matricaria 3y ago
  I feel like this is an Android specific problem. The author says iOS has the same issues but I don’t think this is entirely true. I can move the cursor by pressing and holding the spacebar or 3D touching anywhere on the keyboard. I can then 3D touch harder in the same movement to select a word and drag to select more. One tap on that selecting brings up the menu. Double tapping selects a word, double tap and drag lets you select more. Here the menu appears instantly. And the proficient users can even three finger pinch to copy and three finger zoom to paste. Or three finger tap to get a special menu. —— This one might be specific to me but I can type on mobile nearly as fast as I can on my keyboard (I might just be a slow typer). I also sometimes feel like I’m the only one who highly appreciates autocorrect. It rarely makes mistakes (great, now I get roasted for every typo). Still, editing on the computer is much better. I use a lot of shortcuts and vi modes where I can. But I don’t think this can be emulated on mobile. Please prove me wrong.
  • kevinlinxc 3y ago
    I can do the spacebar hold + drag on Android with the SwiftKey and Samsung keyboards.
    • matricaria 3y ago
      I don’t see what problems the authors fixed.
• kaon123 3y ago
  About 15 years ago, in the era of dumbphones, I read an article in the news paper that in Japan's top 10 novels, 7 of them were written on a mobile phone. It appeared as if writing and text editing (writing a novel is a lot of editing) for mobile phones was solved for Japanese, and it was a matter of time until it would arrive in Latin scripts. Still waiting for that future. I wonder if things in Japane regressed too?
• Bishonen88 3y ago
  I purchased a samsung fold 5 with the hope of it being big enough to make a significant difference in how/what I use my cell phone (for). While the bigger screen is indeed a step in the right direction, most of the shortcomings from smaller screens are still here. Text input, as described by this post is just as silly on a phablet like it is on an iphone. I even went as far, as purchasing a logitech mobile keyboard (with a tablet/phone slot) so that I can reply to something longer than a short sentence. For me its obvious, that without a physical keyboard, the phone will remain a device to scroll up and down and will not replace a pc, no matter how big the screen is.
• husamia 3y ago
  reminds me of once I saw a girl with the iPhone 1 when it first came out. during lecture, she was dictating the lecture on her iphone 1. she was so fast, I was wondering what she would be using today.
• geonnave 3y ago
  > Selecting text > (...) there is a completely new gesture, double tap. Wait, there is actually a third gesture long press, which also works. TIL about the double tap -- always used the long press to select text. It is interesting that the author refers to long press as an alternative. Do most people use double tap for that?
• 0x38B 3y ago
  I've always dreamed of having Maya-like menus (1) on mobile. The edit menu they demonstrate in the article (2) reminds me of them. On the topic of mobile text editing: I use an iPhone SE (2nd gen), which has a 4.7" screen. The other day, I needed to translate some text. In iOS's Notes, I couldn't type and see my source at the same time. So I did what any iOS user would do and opened vim (3), made a v-split for the source, then wrote and edited my translation. Vim-users, do you also find vim good on a small touchscreen? 1: https://youtu.be/j15MLgnIKfI?t=66 https://youtu.be/j15MLgnIKfI?t=66 2: https://youtu.be/_9YPm0EghvU?t=224 https://youtu.be/_9YPm0EghvU?t=224 3: in a-shell.
• pfooti 3y ago
  One notable thing, I have linburg-comstock in my left hand, and this is apparently not uncommon (estimated to be around 30% of the population in one form or another, iirc). This means I cannot curl my thumb without my pointer finger also curling. This is not something that can be stretched or relaxed or otherwise fixed without surgery- my tendons are cross-connected. The result is that typing on a cell phone keyboard ends up cramping my hand very quickly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linburg%E2%80%93Comstock_variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linburg%E2%80%93Comstock_varia...
• bitterblotter 3y ago
  Is there a way of installing this on android?
• rvba 3y ago
  For me lack of delete (deleting text forward -> compare vs backspace) is a real problem.
• gershy 3y ago
  This is one of the rare times I've seen tech demonstrated, and immediately felt a strong need to have it for myself
• HeavyStorm 3y ago
  It's so sad that the author has to spend multiple paragraphs convincing us of a problem that's clearly there.
• zby 3y ago
  I am waiting for social websites that don't allow any input on mobiles. Reading allowed - but replies only on a proper device. We don't need more low quality content.
• nottorp 3y ago
  No one edits text on mobile. They just let it go without correcting it and hope the recipient will understand. It's that hard to do it properly. Hint: all misspelled or weirdly capitalized comments in my HN history were made on mobile.
• shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I hate that mobile has become the default platform for a lot of applications and desktop is a second class citizen.
  • craighay1 3y ago
    Is this because application developers are simply going where the people are? Or is there better data harvesting to be had on your average iOS/Android app with blindly accepted permissions than there is in the average desktop browser.
• namelosw 3y ago
  And apps like Notion and Obsidian have to use web technologies because there are simply no alternatives. Even those React rich text editors don't support React Native. It's just way too hard to solve this problem for medium-sized teams.
• Aerbil313 3y ago
  I guess - it's just that nothing is mature yet. I can easily see this problem taking a century to "solve". Society has a lot of inertia and tech is always unintuitive - what even is a keyboard? Can I eat it? Can I burn it to cook the meat?
• xnasero 3y ago
  I really like the typewise keyboard app, it's great IMO
• distract8901 3y ago
  I'm actually rather surprised that we're still using qwerty layouts on touchscreen devices. Of all the possible ways to input text with your thumbs, this is undoubtedly one of the worst. I'm sure plenty of people have tried to come up with alternate keyboards, maybe a radial layout or something, but when I look, I don't see a whole lot of activity in this space. There's got to be a better way, surely.
• dTal 3y ago
  - Take laptop, remove the keyboard, nerf the OS, call it "mobile" - Wait for someone to point out that text editing is no longer practical - "I am not anti-mobile. My goal is not to return back to the desktop, but to move mobile forward." Why? Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? Almost every trend "mobile" is pioneering is bad.
  • KirillPanov 3y ago
    Like the linked article says, > Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption ... and will always be consumption devices. A television isn't a substitute for your laptop either.
    • rappr 3y ago
      Phones, sure, but there’s plenty of good productivity and creation software available for tablets. And these days, most productivity software runs in the browser anyway.
    • ncallaway 3y ago
      Just because something is designed for consumption doesn’t mean we should ignore text editing. The fact that there are other devices that are better at text editing is a horrible reason to leave text editing on mobile devices as a terrible experience.
    • matheusmoreira 3y ago
      Termux lets you turn your Android phone into a software development environment. It's surprisingly good.
  • bakugo 3y ago
    > Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience as the inevitable future? The fact that the author worked at Google should be a hint. Advertising companies like Google want desktops and laptops to be left behind in favor of phones and tablets specifically because of the inferior, more locked down and consumption-focused computing experience they provide, and I'm guessing this idea is hammered into all their employees.
• MavropaliasG 3y ago
  At the end of the article the author seems resigned and that it seems impossible to bring this to the end user. I don't understand why? Why can't this be a keyboard that I can switch to, like I'm able to switch from Samsung keyboard to Google keyboard? Or like an accessibility app?
  • eulgro 3y ago
    Because the text editing process is baked in the base UI classes on Android (TextView), you cannot change it with an app. OEM manufacturers sometimes do because they ship different class code with their OS.
    • craighay1 3y ago
      But the author works at Google, so can surely pass the message on up the chain that this design decision is stifling innovation in touch-based text editing?
      • scottjenson 3y ago
        I'm the author. I've been trying...
        • p1mrx 3y ago
          I suggest focusing on the minimum viable product: an app with a single text field. Maybe add the option to load and save txt files, but even clipboard I/O would be sufficient. Just let people play with the editor. If it's actually good, the next steps should become obvious.
      • Muromec 3y ago
        It’s a big company, so unless you can make a nice project to be promoted, it doesn’t get in the list of priorities
• eulgro 3y ago
  The author made a demo app, surely this could be evolved into a library? I could give an option to users of my app to switch all text inputs to use this instead of the system's default.
  • yonatan8070 3y ago
    I wish there was a way to try that demo on my own device instead of just seeing it in videos
• gchamonlive 3y ago
  Please fix this. I mainly use my phone to write hn comments and it is already too much pressure on the current state of the typing experience for me. I could imagine myself doing all sorts of support and maintenance jobs from my phone if only I could interact better with code on it.
• fisian 3y ago
  My biggest problem in editing on mobile is changing a text selection (for example a long URL or long text paragraphs) that don't fit on screen at once. Once I have to scroll (vertically or, even worse, horizontally) in addition to moving the selection handles the UX is just terrible.
  • deely3 3y ago
    I don't know about IPhone but on Android its simply impossible to Paste text between two words. You can't paste text into cursor position you can only replace selected text with Pasted text. Thats my main biggest issue. Also, why the fuck there no Copy/Paste buttons on mobile keyboard??
    • ddingus 3y ago
      The hacker keyboard and unexpected keyboards both offer ctrl-[acvx]
    • usrusr 3y ago
      I eventually learned to place the cursor, squiggle a little random swipe (and a blank) that I can then select and replace. It's certainly an unintuitive nuisance, but my personal biggest issue is something else: No advanced keyboard seems to have a setting to not force an automatic blank after each and every swiped word, no advanced keyboard beyond the original Swype that was abandoned a long time ago. Some have elaborate workarounds for fixing blanks before punctuation, but none seem to allow to leave space bar operation to me. I use a lot of composite words (hello from Germany) and the forced blanks are just infuriating. So I use anancient keyboard that was abandoned at some point between flappybird (composite word!) and 2048 or earlier and can only hope that Android keeps doing acceptable backward compatibility...
      • mackrevinack 3y ago
        have you tried florisboard? i would probably use that as my main keyboard but the way it doesn't add a space after words when you swipe something kind of bugs me, especially after getting so used to it with other keyboards
• dan-robertson 3y ago
  I was slightly surprised by the author’s example experiments. Deleting x from the middle of a word does not sound like a common editing task to me and I think it would be much more common to just select the whole word and retype it. If that means the UI is more optimised for other interactions than deleting letters from the middle of words, I think that’s fine. It seems pretty important to have the tests be realistic or their results won’t relate much to the real world. It is possible to connect a keyboard to a phone though obviously this is a bit silly. But it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience. And iPhones tried being better at text editing and apple dropped those changes, so it does seem they at least didn’t feel the change was worth it: - you used to be able to select a word and pressing shift would toggle the suggested correction between regular, capitalised, and uppercase. That feature was dropped - with the pressure-sensitivity feature, you could press on the keyboard to turn it into a kind of touch-pad for moving the cursor, this meant your finger didn’t get in the way of the text so you could see where the cursor was going. You could press harder to begin a word-by-word selection then move to select more or press harder to upgrade to sentence/paragraph selection. Apple got rid of the pressure-sensitive screens in newer phones and give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection (as far as I know) and makes it hard to move the cursor down.
  • mitemte 3y ago
    I just realised you can long press space to enable moving the cursor, then tap the keyboard with another finger to toggle selection mode on.
  • zimpenfish 3y ago
    > give them a long-press space bar gesture, but this doesn’t allow for selection If you put a second finger on the keyboard when you're doing long-press-space, it'll do selection but it'll stop when you lift your finger off space (if you've run out of display when selecting downwards) and won't pick up where you left off - you have to move to the little selection handles instead. Handy for small selections, I guess?
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    Deleting an 'x' was MEANT to be hard (and not typical) the whole point was to see how easy it was to target. As to your "it does seem obvious that people don’t care that much about the text-editing experience" You are exactly the type of person that I'm trying to get through to! As I said in the post, for most social media tasks, text editing isn't a problem. However, if you believe that mobile will replace desktop, then you've got a problem as sophisticated text composition is quite hard on mobile.
• underseacables 3y ago
  My takeaway is tacit irritation at the size of the screen. If it were larger then it would be easier to position a cursor and edit a word. With a keyboard and mouse, of course, it would be very easy. Our fingers are pretty large compared to smartphone screens, and regrettably that can only be helped with a stylus you'll lose.
  • dhbradshaw 3y ago
    Could have a track pad on the back of the phone
    • qntmfred 3y ago
      most people use phone cases
      • worthless-trash 3y ago
        The case would not cover the touch pad.
      • corbezzoli 3y ago
        That’s their own loss
• kgwxd 3y ago
  Arrow and modifier keys, problem solved. If we’re going to keep making the screens ridiculously huge, use the space for functionality instead of gimmicks.
  • shiomiru 3y ago
    I've been using Hacker's Keyboard in compact mode for years now for this reason. (And my screen is pretty small for today's standards.) It's just so much easier to edit text with arrow keys, shift-select, ctrl-c/x/v, etc. than getting that teardrop handle to behave, even on a touchscreen.
• craighay1 3y ago
  I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch devices. It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices. Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb typing on a screen. Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on letter based inference could be interesting for one handed / single digit entry of letters. Something like dasher: https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/dashersummary.html https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/dashersummary.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)
  • breakfastduck 3y ago
    modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart phone user.
    • dietr1ch 3y ago
      I don't think so, but the mode change can't be some obscure thing slightly changing in the status bar.
    • genter 3y ago
      There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning Solidworks.
      • troupe 3y ago
        There may be fewer desktops, but laptops work the same way and they don't seem to be going away any time soon. I'm not aware of "tons of professional writers, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing" who spend most of their writing time on the type of mobile devices described in this article.
• jacobp100 3y ago
  With the magnifier no longer being offset - does your finger now not completely cover it? Definitely does raise some good points though - it’s so difficult to get to the select all button on iOS when you actually need it
  • yonatan8070 3y ago
    On current Android, you can drag the cursor directly without seeing the teardrop, so your finger is directly over the cursor, requiring the magnifier to see what you are doing With the demo shown here, you always tap on the teardrop, below the magnifier, so the magnification is more to help you see rather than show you what's under your finger
    • jacobp100 3y ago
      That makes sense. Thanks!
• rumori 3y ago
  I wonder if the author is aware of the cursor positioning gestures on iOS (hold space, then drag) I’m also not sure that the inline magnifier is such a good idea, he never gives an example with a fat finger overlaid, I think that would immediately show it’s just not feasible. I’m also sure that Apple has dozens of user tests with all type of text editing strategies, Ken Kocienda even wrote a book about his process developing text input and auto-correct. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466 https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Proc...
  • mpalmer 3y ago
    He probably is aware, Android has the same gesture.
    • calderknight 3y ago
      I had never heard of this feature. This will be very useful.
    • colanderman 3y ago
      I was not aware of this! This is a game changer for me, my single biggest complaint about text editing (which I was about to post here as something the authors missed) was that there's no means to perform fine cursor movement with gestures (I would expect the cursor to slow when the magnifying lens pops up). But apparently there is already a way!!
    • scottjenson 3y ago
      I am aware ;-) It's certainly helpful. My point is that it's not nearly enough. The goal of this post was to make it clear that the entire model of mobile editing is flawed and it's helpful to rethink it. However, I'm all for anything that can help!
• meatjuice 3y ago
  It'd be interesting if there's a demo that everyone can try on the web. Not only in videos.
• nanna 3y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree with the author but don't think he's radical enough about solutions. Thumb-key takes a radical approach, and I've watched someone who has become comptetent at it (which i haven't) type elegantly on it. https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key But I always wonder why noone has tried building a hardware chord keyboard for a phone. It seems perfectly suited.
  • worthless-trash 3y ago
    I have used one, you are still stuck with the text entry UI widgets limitations. If you want to se PARTICULARLY bad examples, check out the social in-game example of harry potter magic awakened.
  • Phemist 3y ago
    I tried this out for the past hour or so. It takes the 9 most common letters in English and makes them easily accessible through one touch down, whereas all the other letters require a touch+swipe. Multi-lingual support is problematic, the 9 most common letters differ per language, even if you stick to those based on a latin script. So either you end up learning multiple layouts for multiple languages, or end up doing way more touchswipes than should strictly be necessary. Granted, I am a pretty fast and accurate two-thumb typer on a qwerty keyboard (AnySoftKeyboard) on my phone, so it might not be for me. Perhaps someone who struggles more with accurately hitting individuals keys would benefit more from this simplified keyboard
    • Phemist 3y ago
      Point is, I doubt this system will ever be faster (for me) than typing on the qwerty keyboard where all keys are available at a single touch. I would also be interested if this method would improve my ability to type blind, but I think it still suffers from the lack of tactile feedback there, I still dont know where my finger is exactly.
• Springtime 3y ago
  Blackberry 10 had really nice text selection for their phones with physical keyboards. The keyboard itself doubled as a touchpad so one was able to double tap the physical keyboard anywhere in a text box to bring up a loupe and hold the virtual shift Shift key + drag one's fingers along the surface of the keyboard left/right/up/down to highlight text (dragging the selection handles via the screen was also possible but the keyboard method was faster). It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or handles. I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    That seems like a simple idea to test in a keyboard (well the loupe might be hard) but moving the cursor and using SHIFT to select are fairly easy. Who's working on an Android keyboard here? ;-)
    • Izkata 3y ago
      The KEYone and KEYtwo were Blackberry branded Android phones with a physical keyboard that had at least the scrolling ability. Unfortunately discontinued.
• whynotmaybe 3y ago
  I guess I'm the only one to use SwiftKey keyboard with arrows to move the cursor? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-disable-arrow-keys-on-my-microsoft-swiftkey-keyboard-c0a6476d-2b22-4624-bf2b-b3a1163dcfb4 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-di... Edit: fixed link
  • falcolas 3y ago
    Your link is 404ing for me.
    • whynotmaybe 3y ago
      Fixed
  • catbird 3y ago
    Yeah I use swiftkey with the arrows and number row. Also I have it set up so the keyboard appears in the middle of the screen where my thumb can actually reach. I have no idea how anyone can use one of today’s giant phones one-handed with the default keyboard. Reading this article I realized I didn’t even know how to cut and paste on android, and I’d long ago resigned myself to deleting and retyping.
• LightMachine 3y ago
  Watched and read it all and find it amazing work. Text editing on mobile is embarassingly terrible and the proposals presented are very solid. Props to the author.
• originate 3y ago
  Two Suggestions: 1) I use the arrows in my keyboard to move the cursor. (Or letters in vi) Consider four new buttons to be able to move around once the cursor is active. 2) Love this concept. Editing this very post is too hard. This is a big change. Put together the progressive UI that adopts these changes over time. Do the research on user adoption and least impact. Move this from idealist end state, to practical sequence of steps to get there.
• oslem 3y ago
  There was a company, Tactus, who developed a touch screen that had little physical bumps pop out of the screen to represent your keyboard. I’ve always wondered why it never caught on, but I’m sure the technology came with a host compromises. Anyhow, it always seemed like a neat idea. Perhaps it would even allow for a denser button arrangement, giving users their arrow keys back. In other news, I typed this on my phone, having to edit parts of it, and failing to simply drag my cursor to the end!
  • lbotos 3y ago
    Apple had a solid solution with 3d touch -- press a little bit harder and it was near instant jump to right position/highlight. I felt much faster inputting on my iPhone then. I miss it every day.
    • alexeldeib 3y ago
      Doesn’t this still exist? You Force Touch the space bar and get a cursor
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        It used to be pressure sensitive, which made it much faster to respond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch > Haptic Touch is a feature on the iPhone XR (but not the iPhone XS) and later iPhone models replacing 3D Touch. The touchscreen, which no longer has a pressure sensitive layer, distinguishes between a tap and a long-press using a timed delay to activate certain 3D Touch features (only ones for elements that do not have an action assigned to long press). This feature was added to the iPhone SE (1st generation) with the iOS 13 update and to any iPad capable of running iPadOS 13. As of watchOS 7, only Haptic Touch is recognized, and Force Touch is discontinued on all subsequent Apple Watches.
        • Micoloth 3y ago
          3d touch is NOT simply "faster to respond". The whole point is that, it enables a whole new type of interaction, that is: press to get into cursor mode -> hover over a word -> press again to select it. This is simply impossible without 3d Touch. The fact that I've see this exchange many times ("But cant you long press to get a cursor?" / "Yes but 3d touch is faster"), even from people defending it, is so fun to me because it means the technology really was misunderstood, and explains a lot about why Apple killed it... Idk if you can tell, I'm a fan of 3dTouch.
• Semaphor 3y ago
  One thing this article does not mention and what makes mobile text editing slightly more bearable: Using the volume buttons to control the text cursor. It doesn’t support desktop modifiers like Ctrl or Shift, but at least you can properly place the cursor where you want without going mad. For some reason, only LineageOS has that feature, and not even every other ROM. I once tried a different ROM and switched back because the feature was missing, horrible.
• throwerofstone 3y ago
  I fully agree with the author on that text editing is nothing but cumbersome. But instead of modifying and (hopefully) improving on what we have now, I would actually prefer an entirely different solution; one that disables any touch input on textboxes. In place of touch, I'd prefer a new keyboard screen containing a joystick to move the text cursor with. On the opposite side of the keyboard, you could have all the context buttons, together with a 'select' button which can be held while moving the joystick to make a selection. Add a toggle button to the existing keyboard to switch from and to these new input options and you're all set. Whether this solution is intuitive enough for the average mobile user is up for discussion.
• davidmurdoch 3y ago
  Not a single mention of the biggest problem, by far, of text editing on Android: no undo? Fix that before literally anything else on Android, please. > too many people mistakenly see text editing as “done” I can't imagine anyone that uses both desktop and mobile to think mobile text editing doesn't need improvements.
  • justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > no undo It works fine, you just need a keyboard what would allow you to send Ctrl+Z. Yes, there should be a menu item (at least in a pop-up) too... BTW, there is a API to add your things to that pop-up (like for searching providers etc) so there is a chance you can make it.
    • davidmurdoch 3y ago
      iOS has "shake to undo", which isn't perfect, but at least it's something.
      • kergonath 3y ago
        It’s clunky, you look utterly ridiculous whilst doing it, but it is occasionally very useful. I’ve found that the UI gets better about putting undo arrows everywhere, though. But then even that is not really elegant.
      • galad87 3y ago
        Or tap with three fingers to bring up the tools menu, or double-tab with three fingers to undo. Still a bit clunky.
      • dan-robertson 3y ago
        You can also do settings->accessibility->touch->back tap and set a single/double tap to send the ‘shake’ gesture.
        • code_duck 3y ago
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  Long-form text-editing on a phone is going nowhere for me. I can't even type in my phone-number without having to correct 3 or 4 mistakes. Basically, I can't use a phone for anything that involves free-form data entry. In practice, I only use the thing to receive SMS messages containing verification codes (which I can't receive on my laptop). The phone doesn't travel with me (i.e. it's not in fact mobile). It stays near the laptop, which also doesn't travel. My eyesight isn't that great these days. And I have a distinct sense that my fingers and thumbs have got fatter with age; one thumb covers three "buttons" on the virtual keyboard. You may say that I should get a bigger, more-modern fondleslab. But the buttons on the virtual keyboard are the same size on big fondleslabs as they are on my old one; they keep the keyboard as small as possible, so that app designers have more screen to play with.
• Eduard 3y ago
  Biggest fail on Android IMHO: you cannot paste _within_ a word. copy and paste should be dedicated soft buttons, at least as long presses.
  • colanderman 3y ago
    You definitely can with recent GBoard versions. If something is in the clipboard, tapping somewhere (including within a word) to move the cursor brings up a paste button in the prediction bar.
  • twic 3y ago
    Yes you can. Tap to place the cursor, tap on its fat tail to get a context menu, select paste.
    • Eduard 3y ago
      [flagged]
• TrianguloY 3y ago
  I still use Swype, the button to select the word the cursor is at is irreplaceable. No other keyboard I know of has it. There are also more suggestions and you can scroll them. Google's keyboard only shows 3, and two of them are basically the same with different capitalization. It's just horrible. The other benefit is that you can quickly copy/cut/paste/select all with a single swipe action (from the swipe button to the c, x, v, a keys respectively). There is just an single downside: no swipe on the space bar to move the cursor. But with another gesture you can turn the keyboard into an arrows one.
  • stavros 3y ago
    I don't know why there aren't any good keyboards. SwiftKey came close, but as it grew it became slower and slower and now it's just ossified and abandoned, with a few really annoying bugs that surely should have been easy to fix (like "forget this word" actually forgetting a word).
• TrianguloY 3y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but when dragging the handler, specially on a selection, it often moves after releasing the finger, it's infuriating.
  • twic 3y ago
    Same. But I get this on desktop too, with a trackpad. Makes precision selection when image editing very frustrating. It would be nice if there was a simple and universal way to do this interaction more precisely!
• bmacho 3y ago
  Use a keyboard app with arrows. My choice is "Hacker's keyboard" [0] but I think there are others. (Search reddit for best keyboards with arrows.) I can't say more about it, text editing is not a problem on mobile. It's ok. I installed, then I forgot. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
  • OrangeMusic 3y ago
    SwiftKey has been my favorite keyboard for years (it was the first one to have word prediction). It has this option.
  • justsomehnguy 3y ago
    > Hacker's keyboard My updoots for it. I think it's already a decade I use it exclusively on any Android platform. Sadly soon enough it would break completely, because Android is constantly mangl^W changing.
  • ctenb 3y ago
    Can't run it on newer Android versions
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      Which, specifically? I'm still using Hacker's Keyboard on Android 10. Though I'm also largely relying on F-Droid for apps. Is Hacker's Keyboard not installable via Google Play, or not runnable?
      • ctenb 3y ago
        Not installable on 12
        • dredmorbius 3y ago
          Thanks, that's ... disappointing. Alternatives?
• superkuh 3y ago
  Nothing on mobile is okay. I know everyone loves their smart phones but they really are terrible computers in every way except for portability. Use a computer when you actually want to do things. Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer.
  • hutzlibu 3y ago
    "Smartphones are just for when you're literally unable to use a real computer." When I am lying on a couch or in bed, I could use a laptop or tablet, but for just surfing a bit, a mobile phone is just more handy. But sure, smartphones or tablets are not really useful for anything productive.
  • graemep 3y ago
    I recently bought a PineTab2. Its a pretty rough around the edges experience (hardware is fine, but Plasma Mobile is still lacking compared to Android) BUT with the case with a keyboard it is far better for writing anything. Not as good as my desktop, but a lot better than most mobile devices. I usually use Whatsapp web and the Signal desktop app at my desktop when I want to write more than sentence or two. A physical keyboard makes it so much easier. For example, I left making my comments here today until I sat down at my desktop. If you must use a phone for typing more than a tiny bit, buy a keyboard for it. Even a little bluetooth keyboard is a lot better. I am tempted by phones with keyboards. I used to have a Blackberry a long time ago and there are Android phones in similar formats.
    • tetris11 3y ago
      Yearly reminder that Nokia perfected the slideout keyboard on their N900 model over 10 years ago
      • asimovfan 3y ago
        Also there was an actual linux distribution in it, Maemo. You could do things with it.
• captn3m0 3y ago
  Another issue I sometimes face is gestures around the screen edge are confused. Selecting text on the left edge will trigger “Back” in some cases.
• plaidfuji 3y ago
  1000% agree with this post, wow. I can’t believe this is controversial.. it’s a disaster. I dread opening the mobile version of google docs, sheets, or even Notes for anything more than a grocery list. The problem is the target audience for this is business customers, and particularly those in management, so it’s a small market. ICs aren’t up and down as much between meetings and can largely stick to their desktop setup. But the manager’s life is one of constant movement, reviewing and making comments on things, drafting, editing, tweaking, etc… and usually in blocks of time where it doesn’t quite make sense to sit all the way down (unless you’re really good at calendar management, which.. also sucks on mobile!) > fixing text editing isn’t seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS. I think there’s a group of people for whom this would make all the difference. It’s just not your typical consumer. EDIT: and before you say “sounds like you just want a tablet” - I don’t! A tablet is the difference between lugging around a briefcase with me everywhere, or not.
  • kibwen 3y ago
    > before you say “sounds like you just want a tablet” One of my friends uses a GPD Pocket 3, which is an 8-inch computer that's small enough to fit in your pocket, with a full keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen that swivels to become a tablet. It's pretty nifty. https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3 https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
    • screye 3y ago
      I'd say purchase a folding phone. It's great.
      • Someone1234 3y ago
        It doesn't address this editing issue at all. It somewhat attempts to address multi-tasking, but this thread is specifically about how poor the text editing experience is, and I'd like to hear how a folding phone fixes that? I have an iPad and even there without a mouse plugged in, the editing experience is poor.
        • 3y ago
• smiley1437 3y ago
  Any Blackberry that had a trackball\trackpad was great at editing text - because it had the cursor movement and text selection cleanly separated from the touch screen. Too bad that ship has sailed. I still miss my Bold every time I try to edit text on IOS
• mabbo 3y ago
  When my wife was super pregnant and overdue, friends were consistently asking for updates. I made a website called "is<wife's name>stillpregnant.com" and put a very very minimal website there. It was literally just route53 and cloudfront in front of an S3 bucket. But that meant I needed to make updates from the hospital with my phone. I mean yes there were probably better options but I was a bit busy at the time to think of them. Let me just say that writing raw HTML files using textedit for Android was not a great experience. It's just not the right interface for making complex text. Maybe LLMs will help with this, allowing us to describe what we want at a higher level, through voice or text. But God help me I do not want to try to write valid HTML on a phone (after being awake for 35 of the previous 36 hours).
  • adithyassekhar 3y ago
    This is the kind of stuff you read on 4chan as memes about orange site. While going through all that you decided to create a website of all things and update it by hand editing html. Normal people, and I hate saying that, would create a facebook/WhatsApp group or something like that. I'm not making fun of you or anything, not everyone has the same lives, I'm just amazed by the hn crowd.
    • Pxtl 3y ago
      I mean even if you are going to make a self-hosted site for this, like, there's software you can use where you're not using raw html. I use a static site generator that takes markdown. I don't find markdown too hard to write on mobile, as long as I don't need images.
    • mdp2021 3y ago
      I was about to comment that using an LLM to update a static site can be seen as overkill like using napalm bombing against mosquitoes, and you post about those considering odd to have your own services to publish basic information... > amazed by the hn crowd ... [whereas] Normal people... I have seen members of the "madding crowd" amazed by people reading a book. And not one: many, in different increasingly bewildering capacities. (Including "law enforcement", calling it "suspicious behaviour".) Be careful of what can be called "normalcy" nowadays.
• kibwen 3y ago
  The irony is that despite their conceptual elegance and increasing ubiquity, touchscreens are a technological dead end as far as HCI is concerned. As dim as I am on the current slate (and near-future) of VR headsets, their gestural interfaces are much more promising in the long run (though still lacking in some ways compared to mouse and keyboard).
• yonatan8070 3y ago
  Is there a way I can download and run the demo on my own phone? It looks interesting but there seems to be no download links
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    I'm the author. As the code is owned by Google, I'm a bit constrained in sharing it. I've got permission to talk about the work and show it, but that's about it.
• pard68 3y ago
  Step back. Text /input/ on mobile isn't okay. It's a copy (for the most part) of desktop editors as well. There have been a few changes, such as dragging your finger around. A few keyboards have tried (and largely failed) to introduce new, mobile-first keyboards. It doesn't stick. I have used a number of non-qwerty/typewriter style mobile keyboards. I have landed on MessagEase, but really loved a few others. Thankfully MessagEase still works, most died somewhere in the mid 10s.
• skyboo 3y ago
  Ever tried editing the URL in the URL bar in iOS Safari? It's even worse than just editing as it involves horizontal scrolling in a tiny box. Why don't they expand the URL address bar to be a large text box when selected is beyond me.
  • twic 3y ago
    My peeve with the URL bar in Firefox on Android is that there's no way to partially select. A tap places the cursor, and a long press selects the whole URL. There's no way to select the domain, or a value from a query string, etc. Simply supporting the normal text editing gestures here would allow this, but the developers have gone out of their way to make it impossible.
    • Bombinator 3y ago
      I saw Unexpected Keyboard recommended here, turns out it can do this as well among other things. Just tap Shift and drag left/right on spacebar. The main feature though is that you can enter the characters that aren't used commonly by swiping insted of holding on a key or switching to a different key view. You can also get Ctrl and Alt and you can like lock them as well which is useful in Termux.
• yonatan8070 3y ago
  Something I do quite often with FlorisBoard on Android is holding down shift and dragging the space bar to create a selection, just like I would with shift and the arrow keys on a desktop
• zackproser 3y ago
  While all the same issues highlighted in this post still apply the WYSIWYG editor I'm using in my project, this has been my side project take on rapidly iterating on blog posts from my mobile phone: https://youtu.be/Y36rUWeVnMM?si=yqwrOAanvSJ0fOEt https://youtu.be/Y36rUWeVnMM?si=yqwrOAanvSJ0fOEt It lets you combine speech to text and markdown editing. Partly for fun and practice and partly because it helps me to quickly commence new posts and either iterate on the go or return to the open PR when I'm back at my laptop.
• taneq 3y ago
  I’ve had a growing suspicion for a few years now that the iOS keyboard developers are just taking the piss. Given the level of technical ability displayed in literally every other aspect of the iPhone, there’s no way that the keyboard can be THIS bad and getting worse except on purpose.
• olvy0 3y ago
  Excellent article. I have long thought that mobile has horrible UX, especially for typing. I don't know how other people aren't more annoyed. For me it's because I can touch type relatively fast on a real keyboard, and can switch between a mouse and a keyboard very fast. It's sooo frustrating not having the same speed on mobile while editing. For writing prose, gboard is bad, but it's the least bad solution, its sliding gestures and predictions are good enough. I use unexpected keyboard for programming on the go. Free and open source, originally developed for termux. It has arrow keys and modifiers, and undo also works (ctrl z). TBH it's not perfect for me as it doesn't have predictive text and its arrow keys are fiddly, so I use it sparingly.
• gcanyon 3y ago
  The problem is far from invisible (to me at least). A few months ago on HN I used text editing as an example of how iOS wasn't ready for "business" use. I can't find the comment now, but my memory is that I listed several of the issues listed in this post and said something like "Text creation/editing is core to the 'business', non-content-consumer use case. Apple needs to either acknowledge these problems and work to solve them, or admit they cannot solve them and stop pushing this narrative." It's especially telling that the author references Apple's 3D Touch as being an enabling technology here, when Apple shipped it without thinking of a valid use case for it, and then discontinued it after several years of still not thinking of a valid use case for it. It's interesting to me that Google had Tablet Tuesdays. One of the things I've said many times is that it's obvious when a company actually does the thing they're pressing users to do. Google obviously uses gmail, and just as clearly never used any of the social products they released. But I think Tablet Tuesdays doesn't accomplish the thing they hoped it would: if you can use a regular computer 4 days out of 5 -- or maybe 5 out of 6 :-( then you can limp along on that one day and not have enough incentive to actually solve the problems. "Tablet Tuesdays" should have been "Tablet Teams" -- whole groups of people forced to use nothing but a tablet, with no way to hide from the problems that caused. Eloquent seems like an excellent existence proof that better is possible. Personally, I would try multi-touch gestures to solve some of the problems. It might be (okay, likely is) too complex a solution, but Apple (at least) can detect up to ten(?) separate touchpoints. That would be absurd, but I'd be curious to try copy/paste with multi-touch shortcuts. And it seems that selection might benefit from multi-touch as opposed to the (admittedly clever) pressure hack Eloquent is using.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • teddyh 3y ago
    > A few months ago on HN I used text editing as an example of how iOS wasn't ready for "business" use. I can't find the comment now Was it this one? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36536203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36536203>
    • 3y ago
• sn41 3y ago
  By the way, a simple solution I have come across to make the experience slightly less painful: use an OTG adapter, and plug in a USB keyboard. Most offices/hotels etc have USB keyboards lying around, and the OTG adapter is a tiny device. This means that I can reply to emails when I am travelling, and I have found the experience satisfactory. It's not a truly mobile solution, though, since carrying a keyboard around yourself, is bulky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go
• imgabe 3y ago
  Honestly, just learning that you can long press on the space bar to move the cursor around has fixed 95% of my mobile text editing woes.
  • alesso_x 3y ago
    Long press on space bar to move the cursor is great. Also iOS supports “Drag Press for text selection” which the article says it has implemented.
• enragedcacti 3y ago
  I wonder if there is a way to unboil the frog and introduce features in a backwards compatible way. One way could be to implement some or all of this along with changes to Android's "spacebar drag" cursor movement mode. Currently it can only move left and right unlike Apple's touchpad approach. Maybe I'm missing something but it feels like you could implement a lot of the features through a keyboard touchpad while keeping regular editing clunky but familiar. By expanding on an otherwise very limited feature it might be welcomed by power users without depriving anyone of their existing workflow and muscle memory. One problem that comes to mind is that people are used to selecting from beginning to end and triggering the interaction from the bottom of the screen gives very little area go down while keeping 1:1 movement of the cursor. It could be solved by having the cursor hit the "roof" until the users finger matches the translated position then switch to a scrolling mode at the edges.
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    I'm the author. I agree, this could be a good way to do it. It's what I meant by a "slow burn" in the post. For example, just start with improvements to tapping and dragging, then add a better magnifier, etc. Just getting rid of some of these ambiguous bugs would be helpful.
• syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  This problem was solved 20 years ago when devices like the Blackberry popularized the miniature physical keyboard. Those interfaces were much easier to type on than these crap touch keyboards we've been given. Phone manufacturers told us these are better, but in reality it's just cheaper to make a software keyboard interface than it is to make a bunch of tiny buttons. The original IPhone "un-solved" the problem and then every phone company copied Apple because that's what they all do. And here we all are complaining about this like it's 2010 all over again.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  This wouldn't even be hard to fix. Give me a modal button on the keyboard for cursor mode, like how we've the numerical keyboard mode. When pressed, shows arrow-keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, pageup/pagedown, home/end, a delete (not backspace) key, a shift-toggle, and a button that shows the longpress copy/paste menu. There. No need to reinvent the wheel, just do the same stuff desktop does but with the actual keys desktop has. The spacebar-drag trick is cool, but it's not enough.
• QuadrupleA 3y ago
  Smartphones seem more of a consumption device then a creation device - text editing hassle is a big factor.
• z3t4 3y ago
  My first smartphone in 2000 had a very thin pen, that allowed for high precision typing, selecting text, etc. The OS was made for pen usage. Android and iOS are however not designed for pen usage. I tried a Galaxy note, but due to Android not being pen friendly I ended up using my fingers instead. If you want to be productive, just use a stationary computer and all the ergonomics that comes with it. Some phone models today have USB-C and you can dock the phone to a keyboard/mouse & big screen and the smartphone will go into "desktop" mode.
• mywacaday 3y ago
  I miss the ability to move the cursor by sliding my finger on the space bar, not sure when it disappeared though.
• awinter-py 3y ago
  I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is a huge attention suck and kills my input speed On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain while we're griping: - on an older android device the built-in keyboard is such a pig that it sometimes requires you to slow down to like 1 character per second. Note that this worked fine on a nexus 5 with aosp a million years ago, so it's not like it's not a solved problem - Swipe keyboard is in theory good, but the keyboard can't switch from swipe <-> tap smoothly enough and usually causes an error - droid has the ability to drag inside the spacebar to move the cursor, but the first time you do this, it inserts a word instead because it's confused about what mode it's in
  • pixelmonkey 3y ago
    I was the same way. I only had a Blackberry for a short while -- a BlackBerry Bold 9000 (got it in 2009). It was my stop-gap between plain cell phones and my first Android phone (a Droid 4, got it in 2013). Then I moved to touch screens with the Samsung Galaxy S4. I'm currently a Pixel 7 user. Nothing ever matched the typing speed of the Blackberry Bold 9000. I was slowed down a bit by the slide-out on my Droid 4, and slowed down a TON by switching to touch. I could actually "do email" on my Blackberry. At essentially the same speed as my laptop. But, even today, with many years of practice, including swipe, text prediction, and all the rest -- writing a mid-size email on my phone is excruciatingly slow vs my typing/thinking speed. Even more frustrating is that when people observe me typing on my touchscreen, they'll say, "my goodness, you type SO FAST." And I'll just think, this is half-speed for me. As a simple example, sometimes I try to transcribe text from a podcast I'm listening to on my phone. It's basically impossible -- I have to go back frequently, slow it down to 0.7x audio speed, etc. But, if I transcribe text on my laptop, I can do it so fast that I type ahead of the speaker, even a fast talker. It makes a difference. I could have transcribed a live speaker on my Blackberry Bold. I could even type at thinking speed, which was great. Alas. Two steps forward, one step back.
    • pixelmonkey 3y ago
• the__alchemist 3y ago
  Even ripping the keyboard off my surface to save space etc, it feels crippling unless I'm watching or reading something passively. To a lesser extend, using a trackpad vice mouse. Or a controller in FPS games.
• guestbest 3y ago
  I wonder what text editor apps are excellent examples of efficient mobile text editing. Does anyone know?
• failuser 3y ago
  I still lament the effective death of physical phone keyboards, but it’s decided by the users already, apparently. The new generation got used to be typing on the screen and don’t even know what they are missing. Same with gaming: the gamepad with horrible accuracy that mandates autoaim and limited number of buttons became standard. I can’t do fathom it, but people who grew up gamepads see no issue.
• amelius 3y ago
  Maybe we just need a speech-to-text interface. Like in the old days, with voice-recorders.
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  My solution to text editing on a mobile device is: - Use a hardware keyboard. - Install Termux. - Install and use vim (or emacs, or nano, or whatever) to edit. That is, use a goddamned fucking text editor designed for the task. The fact that devices similar to the 1990s-era Psion Series 5 are rare as hen's teeth doesn't help. This was pocketable (given sufficiently large pockets), had basic office productivity apps preinstalled (word processor, spreadsheet, database, email, contact and diary manager), as well as its own scripting language. It was optimised for power consumption and battery life. I know at least one journalist who used the device to file copy on the road --- this was no toy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5> I'd love to see a modern update based on e-ink rather than LCD, as I wrote a few months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36171805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36171805> (I did receive a highly intriguing email suggesting such a device might be in development but have had no further follow-ups.) There's a delicate balance between size, usefulness, and portability which is challenging to get right. In virtually all cases even the worst netbook-type compact laptop is superior for any significant composing task than the best smartphone or tablet. Touch-only interfaces are ultimately a dead-end. The section of Jenson's article on how taps can be misinterpreted should be tattooed to the forehead of every UI/UX designer, PM, and marketer on the planet, as well as stenciled to all office walls, windows, doors, and whiteboards. I've railed about the ambiguity of selection vs. movement before (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771672>), but Scott highlights additional nuances. Does a screen touch: place the cursor? bring up the menu? start a drag? start a double tap? start a long press? And what of when the user is disabled (Parkinsons, other motor/neuron disorder), tired, ill, drunk, in a moving vehicle (preferable not as the driver/operator), juggling children (don't drop), or in any other way at less than 100% focus, attention, ability, and dexterity? I've had some variant of a smartphone or tablet since the mid-aughts. The two I've the fondest recollections of were the first (a Palm Centro, with a hardware keyboard) and my most recent (Onyx BOOX Max Lumi). Each has different strengths. The Centro was good for basic text entry, though its display was minimal. The BOOX is a large e-ink device which is excellent for reading and has Termux (a Linux userland for Android) installed. With an external keyboard it's passable local Linux system and can be used to SSH elsewhere, though the combined set is not something that can be crammed into a pocket. Slides easily into my messenger bag though. As I'd listed out in table-form three years ago, there is no use-case for an emissive-display tablet for which it is superior to a different device, and the distinction is little changed for smartphones. Display + keyboard remains the ultimate productivity environment. For capability, privacy, and flexibility, I'd prefer separate audio, image/video, and comms devices, each of which individually can be quite small. Technological advances for each is slow enough that these need not be replaced frequently (once a decade or more should be sufficient). The main driver of late has been storage capacity, though with 1 TB being now widely available, that's no longer a driver for text, audio, or even to a large extent images, though video can of course consume prodigious storage. The privacy advantages of airgapped generative / capture tools, with a separate comms-capable device also seem increasingly advisable.
• tambourine_man 3y ago
  Not having a global menu is a terrible hindrance. Understandable with the original iPhone screen size, but definitely not today with the phablets we all carry. I also want multiple undo everywhere and consistently like any decent desktop.
• MobiusHorizons 3y ago
  I recently upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 13 mini. I thought I would miss the home button, but what I really miss is 3D Touch in the keyboard for moving the cursor. It doesn’t solve editing text on mobile, but it went a long way.
  • htk 3y ago
    Hold the space key and it also becomes a trackpad.
    • MobiusHorizons 3y ago
      Thanks! Happy to know that feature is not completely gone. I actually asked at the apple store about this, but they thought there was no equivalent in the new phones.
• hexage1814 3y ago
  I honestly think this problem is unsolvable, like, you can only do so much with typing on screen. Maybe with a device that read your mind and allowed you to type by thinking, but with that aside, I don't think there is a solution. I think this is a fundamental limitation of mobile.
• codeptualize 3y ago
  Why does this not mention long press on the spacebar on ios? It largely solves this problem. Long press on spacebar, keep it down and move around to move the cursor. While dragging tap with a second finger to start selection mode.
  • spiderfarmer 3y ago
    Problem is that that feature is not very discoverable. But I agree. The author seems very Android focused because most issues don’t really exist for iOS users once you know how it works.
    • jzb 3y ago
      It's not discoverable. I learned about it through some "things you should know about iOS" listicle or something. Once I picked it up, I've used it a lot. I loathe when apps interrupt usage to say "did you know you can?" but... this is one of those things where Apple should point the feature out on upgrade, or something.
    • LinAGKar 3y ago
      Gboard has the spacebar drag too, though not the tap to select.
      • codeptualize 3y ago
        Cool! wasn't aware. Then it is even more relevant for the article to cover this.
    • codeptualize 3y ago
      Very true, I think that might be on purpose (it's an interesting topic https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ui-accelerators/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ui-accelerators/). Do agree that this one is too hard to discover, Apple doesn't really highlight it at all, while it's so incredibly useful. Luckily there are all the engagement farmers with their ios tips and tricks, maybe that is the official Apple strategy haha, and to be fair it kinda works as people do find out that way.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  As a side note, text editing on desktop also isn't okay. Especially in the browser era, the fact that the "do command" manipulation from text editors and the "do command" manipulation from control panels collided violently in the browser as an application mean that when I do a simple click and drag to select text, I have no idea what's going to happen. Will I select the text? Will I start dragging the link underneath the text? Is the text an image so I start dragging the image? Will I try to activate the button that the text is actually wrapped by? Browsers could honestly use a modifier (additional mouse button or key held down) that put them in a "text selection mode," in which all other meanings of click and click-drag are switched off. That would give the user full control to excerpt text from the page regardless of its context.
• aranchelk 3y ago
  > Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption. They weren’t and then they were. Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry were all devoting around half their user-facing surface area to content creation with physical keyboards. Near then end Nokia did make some really nice Linux-powered slide out keyboard devices. Best of both worlds if not for their thickness.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    And before Palm had a keyboard, it had Graffiti, which could share screen space with display. It took a short period of training but was actually quite good. Far better than onscreen keyboards. I wouldn't recommend Graffiti for, say, trying to access a Linux shell. But for writing text, and editing it, it was serviceable in ways that current touchscreen devices aren't.
• manbash 3y ago
  There is nothing quite like the experience of text editing on mobile with RTL languages.
• DHPersonal 3y ago
  This came up on TikTok for me after visiting this post, so there must be a cookie or tracker that saw what I was reading (or I suppose, it’s complete coincidence). Whatever the reason, this is helpful: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86HSvwL/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT86HSvwL/
• jzb 3y ago
  I 100% agree with this. My teen, OTOH, refuses to use a keyboard to write papers or do anything. She finds it completely normal and preferable to write on her phone. To me this feels like using a hammer to chop wood, but it's her native input method. Allegedly this is standard in her age group. Makes me wonder about the next few waves of people entering the workforce and whether they're going to hate using keyboards for input.
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    This is exactly the point I tried to make in the paper. Teens are using the phone and that's fine, but if you watch them, it's horribly inefficient. I'm not saying stop using the phone, I'm saying your kid can be far more productive.
• tkuraku 3y ago
  One of the issues is that most of us don't want to edit text on mobile. Beyond quick checks I'll wait till I have a big screen and a full size keyboard.
• pseingatl 3y ago
  People seemed to be writing all the time with the Blackberry keyboard. Pity that a real keyboard is no longer available.
• womitt 3y ago
  Guys at craft.do shipped a good solution to this problem imho
• paultopia 3y ago
  OH MY GOD YES THANK YOU Pasting is particularly hellish because of what essentially amounts to a zero-width tap target. Then add in poorly designed third party apps changing the interface (looking at you microsoft) and it's a nightmare.
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  I completely agree with author's view of the issue. Text editing on iOS and android have always been an afterthought. I mean, how much time did it take for the iPhone to get Copy/Paste ? The weirder part to me was that the iPad didn't bring much improvement on that front. Even with a bigger screen and "desktop class" application, text editing only barely works with a keyboard/touchpad attached. The only improvement has been on moving the text cursor, yet it's still a real pain to select random text in the middle of a page. On the solution though .... I think we should really do something simpler than introduce new paradigms and further dig the "that's how we do it on mobile" well. Just give people damn arrow keys and a crontrol key: let them put a cursor on the middle of the text they want, move the cursor with ultimate precision exactly where they want it, and shift select the text they need. Android does the arrow part right, Windows' on screen keyboard does both right. It's incredible how liberating it is to just select text with the arrow keys, hit ctrl+C, crl+V it elsewhere and be done. That's really not that much to ask, Apple not doing anything in this front feels like sheer laziness at this point.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    I have an iPad that’s about to go out of support and is starting to get some small cracks in a screen corner. Seriously wondering if I should replace it or just take an older, albeit heavier, MacBook for extended travel. I don’t find myself using it at home much and media consumption on planes isn’t that important to me any longer.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      I tried an older macbook for a while, and it was kinda frustrating on two fronts: - reading is subpar Having the ipad in portrait helped a lot for reading A4 size documents, where I'd be much more scrolling on the macbook. The the form factor plays a lot when you're checking documents at an airport counter, reviewing your hotel reservation in a taxi, or looking at a map with others. - I had to baby it a lot more iPads and tablets in general can fit in cases and be lugged around without damage. The screen is also tough enough, where a macbook will be out of order if anything goes between the keyboard and the screen when you close it. That's fine at home, but that means it doesn't get out in any situation where it could be risky. In contrast I bring my tablet in the bathtub in a waterproof sleeve. None of those are absolute deal breakers, I mean we used laptops anywhere we could for decades before tablet areived. But I definitely couldn't go back (disclaimer, I ended up with a Surface Pro. It's nice but as Panos is out of Microsoft now, I have no idea of the future of the lineup...)
• galleywest200 3y ago
  > iOS doesn’t have a teardrop handle but it’s text cursor still has the same ‘eat the tap’ problem. You can just hold down the spacebar to move the cursor. I assume Android does this as well?
• mro_name 3y ago
  when I started designing mobile applications in 2009, I was fully convinced they are inept for (keyed) text entry. No one would type more than a few characters on such devices. Since I found me proven both wrong and right in some sense. Looks we rather sacrificed quality for immediate reaction and enthusiastically do bad text editing and sloppy writing on the go.
• asah 3y ago
  would it help to have a cellphone case with embedded keyboard? (pop your phone into the case if you anticipate work session(s) )
• throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  The author almost saw the fix for this, but didn't. Here's how you fix this: Buttons. Modern phones are horrifying examples of UX, largely because they don't have buttons. You get two buttons for volume, even though volume accounts for probably 1/10,000th of the UX of the user. You get one button for power, because how else do you turn it on? And if you're lucky you get a button where the fingerprint reader is. You also increasingly get an "assistant" button, which can often only be used for activating a shitty voice assistant specific to the make of phone you have. Navigating text editing requires buttons. You can try to use touch tricks, but they're complicated, clunky and inaccurate. For ease of use you need buttons specific to editing. A mouse and keyboard have buttons and shortcuts for editing because a person needs specific functionality for specific use cases. So the phone needs more buttons to make this work. For physical buttons used for editing, nothing I've seen has ever surpassed the clickwheel. It worked for iPod, it worked for Blackberry. You can open menus, scroll with precision, and select items. And a flat layout allows use as arrow keys, compared to the side-mounted version that only has two dimensions. You can emulate this on-screen, though it'll be inferior as haptic feedback is one of the important aspects of the precision of a clickwheel. Arrow keys are another important button layout. They allow precise navigation within a text field so you can get to the place you want to make a specific change in, without the clumsy finger-tapping that never works right. On-screen these need to be dedicated buttons, as a virtual clickwheel can't easily differentiate between just clicking on the top of the clickwheel versus using the arrow functionality, and the UX suffers. Another important button is the delete key, as opposed to backspace. You should be able to delete things in front of the cursor as well as behind it. And then there's the "select characters" cursor modifier. You should be able to start selecting text where the cursor is, navigate using your arrow keys, and then stop the selection, and then click one of the modifiers for copy/cut/paste or just start writing to replace it. And of course we need an undo button, in addition to buttons for cut/copy/paste so we don't need to long-finger-press to show an editing menu. Basically all the buttons I've mentioned could easily fit within an editing box at the bottom of the screen, with the text in the top screen. Having the buttons right there for the entirety of the editing session is the right UX. It's actually faster than keyboard shortcuts, it's more intuitive, and more accurate, with less precision required for the user. Maybe one day these stupid hardware vendors will get off their obsession with chasing Apple and finally introduce some useful buttons on the device again. Until then, fake buttons in an editing modal is the best choice.
• demondemidi 3y ago
  Or maybe mobile is not the correct platform for editing? This sounds like arguing that a hammer makes a terrible screwdriver.
  • hackernewds 3y ago
    "maybe mobile is not the correct platform for web browsing"
    • demondemidi 3y ago
      We've all seen what happens when engineers try to do UI/UX. Maybe you're an engineer and not a designer, and maybe stay in your lane and leave usability to the people who, ya know, study it?
• Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  This is absolutely a problem, but I'm not convinced the author has found a solution. I'd have to try it to know for sure, but from the description, it still sounds finicky. I believe touch screens are fundamentally a bad interface for productivity. Consider the range of actions provided by a mouse: You can hover without clicking, you can left click, or you can right click, all with nearly pixel-level precision. Add in a keyboard and your options expand even further. A smartphone is like a computer with a one-button mouse and an abnormally large, irregularly shaped cursor, where can never be sure which part of the cursor indicates your actual click target. Software on this computer is not aware of the cursor's location until after the mouse has been clicked, and portions of the screen are blacked out when you move the mouse to certain positions. Your keyboard only works when you bring up an on-screen overlay which takes up ~35% of your screen real-estate, on a monitor which is abnormally small to begin with. Could any amount of well-designed software make text entry efficient on this machine? This is a hardware problem, not a software problem.
  • BugWatch 3y ago
    Why not something akin to "fixed-offset cursor"? Actual cursor/pointer is always a centimeter above the finger position (thus always visible [bottom of the screen to be handled as a special case]), and finger movements manipulate position, while hold duration accesses alternate modes. For a somewhat similar implementation (touchscreen is essentially handled as touchpad) look at how Teamviewer handles remote sessions to Windows desktop from smartphones. I would really like any/all of those as a toggle-on mode for use on Android itself... selecting text with arthritis fingers is a pain – literally and figuratively.
    • madebythejus 3y ago
      Try out the app Quick Cursor[1] it does a lot of what you describe. Pretty intuitive too, you build muscle memory for it quickly. 1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quickcursor&hl=en_CA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quickcurso...
  • kffekfko 3y ago
    As far as clicking and basic functions, is a two button mouse really that different from tapping + short holding to open a menu wheel? There's a lot of pain points to me when comparing a touch screen to a PC setup but the mouse isn't one of them.
• rietta 3y ago
  I hate my phone for any sort of editing. I just always bring a laptop. Tablets are nearly useless. I remember dreaming of the days of ubiquitous computing. Now we live in it and user experience sucks.
• _trampeltier 3y ago
  Yes text editing on mobile is really bad. But at least on Android, the OpenBoard keyboard helps a lot. Movement from the cursor and backspace.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• robomartin 3y ago
  > Text editing on mobile isn't OK No, it's completely broken. And mobile is an absolute mess. The touch system is so utterly overloaded with functionality that it effectively makes all these wonderful things completely opaque and, in a lot of cases, not discoverable at all. Ask any iOS user what single, double, triple clicks mean. Ask them if they know about long touch on the spacebar. Ask them to show you everything they know about how to operate the device. What you'll learn is that the vast majority of people pretty know nothing about the function overloading of touch and gestures. They know simple touch interaction and that's about it. The touch screen, whether it is on a phone or in a car, exists for one simple reason: It is a lot easier to make UI decisions when you don't have to make them. It's cheaper. It's faster to design. Manufacturing costs are lower. Testing is simpler. Having design many physical control panels during my career, for products ranging from commercial through aerospace, I can tell you it is a difficult grueling process. In short, pain in the ass. And, if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can't just compile your way out of it. Hardware is hard (and expensive) for a reason. Today's smart phone designers flat-out refuse to add physical UI elements to their phones, instead, choosing contorted ways to overload the touch interface. Prior to iOS devices I owned some very interesting phones and PDA's by companies like Motorola, Blackberry and Palm. In the aggregate, these companies had interesting physical UI ideas that worked very well. A stylus, for example, is brilliantly simple and better than your finger, particularly if more sophisticated, as seen on Wacom tablets. Blackberry had a small trackball you could also click right on the keyboard (another very useful UI element). It was great for editing text and other use cases. Heck, you could use a browser with a proper desktop-style cursor. Motorola had a click-wheel on a PDA-like add-on to their flip phones. Fantastic for navigation and super easy to use. The clip-on also had additional buttons, that made such things as single-handed almost-blind address book navigation very simple. Also, touch screens are incredibly fragile. Example, during a call, any accidental touch will cause problems. I have resorted to switching away from the phone application during my call and, if I have to move around (while wearing a headset) placing the phone facing outward in my pant pocket. I've had too many cases of the phone doing stupid things during a call when in my pocket facing inward. In short, touch screens are terrible for the consumer in a lot of use cases. They are fantastic for the manufacturer because they don't have to make any decisions, manufacture a single product and all is well so long as the torture they inflict on their customers is just below a pain threshold. There are so many potentially interesting ideas that could be explored. Adding a set of user-programmable physical macro buttons somewhere (sides or back). Adding a small cursor-only touch pad to the back for, well, pointing control. Click and right click could be actual buttons. Blackberry's mini trackball was brilliant. And a real keyboard, as a first-class citizen add-on, not something left to third parties with no real support past the basics. If someone wants to make heavy use of a device they would love a real full-width keyboard that clips-on and folds open with a Blackberry style trackball and a few extra keys and functions. Lots of people buy cases for their phones. I would absolutely buy an official fold-out keyboard/case if it was truly integrated so I could actually use the thing without having to remember what triple-click-press-slide-right-and-face-north f-ing means. For me, the phone is unusable for anything beyond the trivial. I hate browsing the internet with it. I don't buy anything other than Uber rides with it. I don't use it to buy anything on Amazon. Text messaging for work is useless other than the very basic, because it is horrible to edit anything and there is no real desktop integration to track and search as you can with an email client. Which brings me to the other problem with mobile: It's 2023. Why isn't my phone seamlessly integrated with my computer? When I plug-in or otherwise connect my phone to my desktop or laptop, the phone's screen should appear on my desktop as a first-class citizen for full interaction without having to touch my phone. I should be able to edit text on my phone from my desktop in a phone window. I should be able to cut, copy and paste anything between desktop and mobile. I should be able to run applications on my phone and interact with them on one of my three 27 inch screens. I should be able to click on a phone number on the desktop and dial it on the phone. I should be able to use the same headphones I use on my desktop to run a call on the phone through the desktop interface. I should be able to move, copy and manage files on the phone from my laptop. Etc. I don't really understand what mobile designers are doing. It seems that they stopped being creative and holding their user's best interests as their primary guidance. They slap a touch screen on an aluminum frame, use as few buttons as absolutely possible. Limit desktop integration to the absolute minimum (iTunes is garbage) and leave third parties to hack stuff together rather than develop exquisitely integrated solution. I could be wrong on this. I firmly believe Microsoft still has a real shot at a next generation phone. Their Windows Phone attempt was a failure for many reasons. What is lacking today are the things I mentioned above, and more. As ridiculous as it may sound in 2023 --because it should have been done by now-- having a device that fully integrates with desktop in an exquisitely usable symbiotic relationship would be nothing less than amazing. That, I believe, would gain traction.
• gr__or 3y ago
  Ima use this opportunity to advertise that I'm working on a mobile shader editor, an area even less adopted to the form factor and am using my structured code editing research[1] to smoothen the experience. The post echoed many of my frustrations and inspired me to consider adopting the fisheye-zoom to my editor. I'm looking for people interested in doing shader programming on the go to try this early version, hit me up if you are interested shade@dflate.io [1]: https://dflate.io/state-of-tofu https://dflate.io/state-of-tofu
• teddyh 3y ago
  > While we should always take care of novice users first, we shouldn’t ignore proficient users. I believe that the relation should be reversed: Make the best system possible, usable by well-trained users, and only then add easy modes, tutorials, child safe modes, etc. with paths for improvement at every level. But when using modern systems, I often feel like I’m reduced to using Fisher-Price toys with one (inoperative) button.
  • gochi 3y ago
    You've made the experience more tedious to create now. If we adhere to the article's advice, you work from the novice upwards. You create more and more freedom as you go up, you also have an easier time catching problems between levels this way. In your proposal, we're expected to start from the top magically creating the best experience, and then jumping back down to novice users, and then scaling up back towards expert level to cover the gaps. It sounds quite jarring, and in practice it winds up leading to lackluster tutorials made by experts who overestimate everyone else's levels (see: "How to draw an owl: draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl").
    • teddyh 3y ago
      Creating a good system for advanced users is not magic. In practice, what tends to happen (when things go well, that is) is that people follow the same course as Douglas Engelbart’s development of the NLS system, which he called “bootstrapping”, and which we today might call “agile” or possibly “devops”. I.e. the initial users are using the system from day 1, and developers are constantly giving users more options and features to aid the users, and since the developers are either in close cooperation with the users, or the groups simply overlap, the finished system (that is, when it starts to change more slowly) is one in which the system is quite complex, but all users are also advanced users who can use it at high speed to tremendous advantage. This is the point at which you should go back and add intermediate levels, tutorials, easy modes, child proofing, etc.
• MatthewGibson 3y ago
  If I have 678 topics and I've done 263 topics, how long would it take "in days" to complete?
• azeirah 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I do feel like text editing is a big problem on Mobile. This is why I got myself a samsung note-line phone, the stylus greatly improves the text editing experience by basically being about as precise as a cursor and having a second button. I still wish text editing was better, I like taking notes on things usually on Obsidian and the entire mobile text writing and more importantly editing is just not too great, but as the demo shows it can be improved a lot... :/
• nottheengineer 3y ago
  I find text editing on mobile to be fine, I'd have to try this to see if it's any better. The article did skip over one important QOL feature that every modern keyboard has: Swiping the spacebar to move the cursor. It solves a lot of the things the author complains about. The thing that causes me physical pain when writing something on mobile is the web. Browsers/websites misinterpret inputs into text fields all the time. Trying to scroll the text field while it has an active selection? Great, now your keyboard is closed and the selection is gone.
• jackson1372 3y ago
  The article doesn't mention two great features on iOS: - Move cursor by tap-and-hold on soace bar - tap-tap for word selection and tap-tap-tap for sentence selection. I use these two constantly
• arminiusreturns 3y ago
  Emacs on termux from a Logitech K780 works great for me, the benefits of not being mouse dependent pay off in life more often than you might expect. Almost all the "editor" apps (foss only app user here) are subpar compared to using emacs/vim. Web apps are obviously the "in-between" without much of a solution. Also, I do miss my Blackberry KeyOne sometimes and have heavily considered some of the newer physical keyboard phones.
• chrnola 3y ago
  This bit is no longer entirely accurate: > For highly proficient users, this gets even worse as their is no command key equivalents for cut, copy, or paste. […] Part of the unspoken reason desktop clipboard use is so high is the speed in which it can be used. Mobile has none of this. I recently discovered [1] that iOS has several three-finger pinch/swipe gestures for copy, paste, cut, undo, and redo. Apparently these gestures were introduced in 2019/iOS 13 [2]. While they are certainly not the easiest gestures to reliably perform, they at least do not suffer from the issues of ambiguity described by the author. [1]: accidentally, of course, because the discoverability of many features on mobile is quite poor [2]: https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/12/gestures-undo-ios-iphone-ipad/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/12/gestures-undo-ios-iphone-ipad...
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    That's a fair point, thank you for bringing that up (I'm the author) While these are certainly helpful, the fact that almost no one knows about this proves they aren't really working all that well. Discovery is a key issue that can't be ignored.
• twobitshifter 3y ago
  So I read this article with my iPad and of course that made me immediately start exploring the text selection within the article - it appears that it has changed in iOS 17 Safari and applies several ideas from the article. * Immediately start dragging. When you pause it immediately enters text selection. If you move slowly you get the loupe otherwise it starts jumping word by word in the text * When you release you get the popup options to do something with your text * Holding the end of the selection and moving slowly gives you fine control over the cursor. * When editing this comment, it doesn’t immediately jump to selection but gives you cursor control right away after long press with the magnified loupe. Move fast enough and the magnifier disappears. This is different behavior from long pressing the space bar. * Double tap and drag gives you the selection behavior. * Double tap and no drag selects the word. Actual coding on a touchscreen is still impossible even with the articles improvements. I’d like to see more work on that. I wonder if speaking to our devices inaudibly could be the long term way forward.
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    I'm the author of the paper. That first one though you called out is VERY interesting (the others seem quite close to what is already done today) We tried pause-to-select and it user tested very poorly as users were thrown into selection far too easily. It was very irritating. However, I can't really criticize it until I've tried it. I'll upgrade my iPad and check it out. Thanks.
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  The fact the iOS delete button moves at snails pace then suddenly jumps to deleting words for about 4 words then suddenly starts deleting whole chunks of text. It’s objectively trash and a nightmare to use when just ramping up single character delete speed alone would be an improvement. This is before we get into the silliness of autocorrect repeatedly autocorrecting the same thing when you delete it and retype it. Dread writing on mobile.
• eviks 3y ago
  Nice effort to fix the broken fundamentals, though this doesn't go far enough. Why no customizable menu buttons? Good note editing apps like Bear on iOS have them, and predictable position makes choice faster/more precise vs a near-cursor popup A selection undo stack (and action undo tree stack) would also help in fixing mistapping and other mistakes And maybe modal editing paradigm could also be a good source of learning? Also fully customizable keyboards would help in text editing (don't like their proposed animation , seems like distracting noise, though maybe in actual use it's not bad)
• ozim 3y ago
  I have DroidVim on my mobile. Time when I really appreciated Vim was when I realized it is such a great way to edit text file on a small touch keyboard. I call text editing on mobile solved issue ;)
• iainmerrick 3y ago
  Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares [...long and detailed description of the problems and how their research attempts to solve them...] Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging. What a strange attitude to take! What’s the point of the research if it’s not aimed at shipping anything? Hopefully this is just a miscommunication and isn’t meant to be as passive-aggressive as it sounds.
  • scottjenson 3y ago
    Passive agressive? (I'm the author) I did research to find a better solution. I did and discovered a wide range of market forces (e.g. people don't like to change) that will make it difficult to ship. But the last thing I intended was to imply giving up. I said very clearly in the post that my solution, Eloquent, was meant to be one possible solution. There are likely many others! My goal of this post was to clearly describe the problem so people a) understood b) knew there were alternatives and c) we could get fired up to actually solve this (even though it WILL be hard to change)
    • iainmerrick 3y ago
      Aha, I’m glad to hear that! I did misinterpret it after all - thank you for the correction. I think it was most likely the phrase “shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging”, implying it isn’t going to happen, that gave me that vibe.
  • LegitShady 3y ago
    >What’s the point of the research if it’s not aimed at shipping anything? research!
• graycat 3y ago
  "Editing"? My most important computing application is KEdit, a terrific text editor. Mobile? Since it seemed like highly inferior computing, I delayed getting one. Finally I did. Tried to do some little thing, and for four hours the fake keyboard came and went for no good reason, several times had to power off the device and log in again. Conclusion: I hate that mobile device. Result: I put the thing in a Faraday cage envelope and put that in a box in my car. I hope never to use it. My only intended use is to contact 911 in an emergency, and I hope never to have one of those. To me, mobile is a big step backwards and very unwelcome. I'm putting up with Windows 10 Home Edition but ASAP returning to Windows 7 Professional. Most important application -- KEdit. Theme in computing: Mostly just text, in files, in the Windows hierarchical file system. Next, macros for KEdit. Next, command line scripts in Rexx. Next, software in the Microsoft .NET version of Visual Basic. Main use of computing: My startup and its Web site. I have the Web site code, 100,000 lines of typing, all from KEdit, all in .NET Visual Basic, running, apparently as intended. Latest Irritation from Mobile: Wanted to order some Chinese food for pick up. Used their Web site. The site assumed I had a mobile phone. So, couldn't order via the site and had to call the Chinese restaurant and give me order to a person, item by item. The assumption of mobile for the Web site ruined the on-line ordering and much of the site. The site was complicated and in the end all they needed was one page of HTML. That one page could easily be plenty good, and even a static page would be better. Good example of computing and a Web site: Hacker News!!!!!
• logbiscuitswave 3y ago
  There’s a lot here I agree with. I dread text entry on iOS and it never seems to get that much better. It seems in many ways to have regressed in iOS 17 as well with things like invisible/near zero contrast text selection, hit detection being generally broken, it likes to super aggressively interpret taps anywhere near a word as me wanting to select a word when I’m just trying to reposition the cursor (and generally a word that’s not even close), and all kinds of other annoyances and friction. But in addition the keyboards just don’t seem to be very good. I can’t tell you for how long now I’ve been infuriated by entering a search in iOS Safari only to have every word separated by a ‘.’ because of how it overloads the right edge of the to have a period right where my thumb likes to go. I’ve tried numerous third party keyboards and they are all some sort of combination of “bad”, so I always end up going back to the built-in one after a while. These are all far from solved problems, it’s just that it seems like a lot of people are so accustomed to the friction that it just seems like one of those inevitable things.
• n_ary 3y ago
  Off-topic: I want to murder the person who removed the beautiful magnifying glass in iOS when manually dragging a text and replaced it with some garbage mini reticle that often bugs out and disappears if I am dragging on multi-line text >:(
• jchw 3y ago
  The vast difference in editing things on a MicroPC with its touchpad and physical keyboard versus a phone is immense. I'm pretty sure I can legitimately type faster and usually navigate UIs faster on a capacitive touch phone, but the frustration of typing and targeting the cursor is unbelievable even after having used smartphones for over a decade now. It's just bad. It is amusing that it's hard to convince people this is a problem, but I sort-of understand. Over time people have learned to just, not edit text on mobile. There's relatively powerful versions of office suites on modern mobile OSes, certainly more powerful than Windows CE devices that had full keyboards would ever ship with, and yet most people don't even really consider doing much on mobile other than sending messages and taking notes, two things that rarely require dragging the cursor. When editing things you quickly type out, gestures like dragging the spacebar to move the cursor around is usually "good enough" for making small edits to fix typos or change the wording, which makes it feel like a non-issue. On Pinephone with Squeekboard, I greatly miss the ability to drag on the spacebar to move text, and even slightly miss the ability to swipe across keys to type. And yet, the weird thing is, even though text editing on Phosh is significantly less refined than either Android or iOS... I ultimately don't have much harder of a time doing it. And I think that speaks volumes on its own.
  • mgdlbp 3y ago
    Every time I pick up my pinephone I feel immense disappointment in what forms of interaction most devices are stuck with today, despite how easily alternatives can be implemented in an open platform as the pinephone has shown. But for just editing text, I find vim and emacs surprisingly usable with a touch keyboard, as long as numbers and needed symbols and modifiers are on the base layer. Precise pointing / fat fingering is solvable for text editing and in general by using the touchscreen for relative input - like a touchpad. That's possible on the pinephone with a userland program that directly interfaces with evdev and uinput in a really simple way[1], taking the ability to run desktop software well beyond being a party trick. All it's missing is a scheme where single, double, or two-finger taps and drags are either relative or absolute to avoid having to switch modes. Or, because the touchscreen, like most, reports touch area, one might have a go at cloning force touch. [1] https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator For swipe input, wvkbd[2] has experimental support that works amusingly well for how sucklessly it's implemented (see the readme), albeit only for long words or reduced dictionaries - so many possibilities, like having zsh write completions to a file. It does need a patch to not interfere with normal typing. Spacebar swiping would also be straightforward to patch (or on sxmo into lisgd instead*). Alternatively, a small key could receive a 4-way swipe gesture like the trackpoint that Windows 10 Mobile had. (btw, hey, the MessageEase patent expired...) [2] https://git.sr.ht/~proycon/wvkbd https://git.sr.ht/~proycon/wvkbd * <rant>I don't know how the devs tolerate the latency that sxmo_inputhandler.sh brings - handling basic OS shell gestures in a long shell script on a platform where every expansion piped to grep causes a noticeable increase in latency is very unsuckless!
• alepar 3y ago
  Not invisible for me. I do occassinally enter moderate amounts of text 3-4 paragraphs). I also like to iterate on my texts, so I do a lot of editing and entering at the same time. The points mentioned in the article are painful, but something I could get adjusted to and get better at with time. There are a couple of things for me though, that I just can't work around, and which are subsequently the biggest pain points for me. These are: lack of vertical space in landscape mode and broken text selection feature. Let me elaborate. Note that I own a google pixel phone, so can't really speak for iphones or androids from other companies. Pixels gravitate towards long and narrow displays. This can be great for portrait mode, but sucks for landscape most of the time. The issue is made so much worse that neither OS or most apps seem to try to optimize for this mode, further wasting the space available. For example, I'm typing this post in Firefox on my phone right now. About 1/3rd of the screen is taken up by the keyboard. This is fine and is actually the reason I use landscape mode - bigger keyboard allows for faster typing. Another 1/3rd however is taken up by a combination of notification bar at the top, gesture hint bar at the bottom and firefox's address bar. With some manipulation you can make the adress bar go away, but the other two bars can not be hidden on pixels period. Perhaps the biggest frustration is the fact that the "fullscreen" mode I want is already implemented on Android for games and such, there's just no way to turn it on for firefox in either the app itself or the OS. Text selection tends to be broken when selecting several paragraphs of text, especially when selecting existing text from a web page - the teardrop just jumps around violently not letting you to put it where you want it. Sometimes you can wrestle it with multiple attempts, but other times it just won't let you leaving you with the only workaround of selecting in smaller blocks. This reminds me there actually was one somewhat recent improvement to text editing on androids from few years back: ability to move cursor by sliding your finger over the space bar. That eliminated one big pain point I used to have.
• johndhi 3y ago
  Along these lines, I hate trying to upvote on hacker news. My finger usually almost clicks downvote and often does.
• c-hendricks 3y ago
  There's a special place in hell for WYSIWYG editors on mobile. It's less WYSIWYG and more "what you're getting is what we interpreted you wanting, good luck"
• rkagerer 3y ago
  Positioning the cursor on Android is a complete disaster. I remember it not being a great experience on iOS, and being shocked when I moved to Android and found out it could be even worse. But I'm even more surprised that in all these years it hasn't been fixed. I hope this matter gains some visibility and traction. In the meantime if anyone knows a good "Graffiti" app keyboard for me to try out feel free to recommend.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  This reminds me of a really cool talk about cursors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76b3c_ssyPQ&t=181s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76b3c_ssyPQ&t=181s It's a long video but the segment I mean is only a few minutes, and it's really fascinating if you're interested in people having to work out surprisingly hard, invisible problems.
• ploum 3y ago
  (too much rant, removing comment)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > This, again, makes me lose all confidence toward humanity Mobile text editing issues were what made you lose confidence? The fact that we have the luxury of nitpicking about such mundane issues (as opposed to, you know, starving) makes me realize how great humanity's innovations have been. I looked at the video for Messagease, and I feel like this must be a joke. I can easily type their sample "the quick brown fox" example using Swiftkey-like tracing easily twice as fast as what they showed in their demo.
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I can buy into the fact that text editing on phones is a pain, but the solutions presented in the video seemed very unconvincing for me. The "only magnify in place" option is obviously a horrible idea. I don't know about you but my thumb is not transparent. The whole reason for moving the magnified piece off to the side is so that you can actually see it. The problem isn't as evident in the video because there is no finger in the way, but I just was imagining this behavior on the comment I'm currently typing, and there is no way I'd be able to see the magnified content if it worked like the proposed solution in the video.
  • vicek22 3y ago
    > The "only magnify in place" option is obviously a horrible idea. I don't know about you but my thumb is not transparent. I think you misunderstood the proposed solution. If you look at the video, the magnification is offset. The improvement is that the cursor is only visible in the magnification.
    • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      But the only way to magnify the place where you just tapped (that is, inline, where the magnification shows where the text is on the page) as you drag would essentially be to not move the cursor as your finger moves (i.e. wait until your finger gets out of the way). I don't even understand how this would work if you're dragging up (going to a previous point in the text).
  • larodi 3y ago
    you are right, thinking the same - the solutions are more in the same directions, but not actually something in the right directions. the windows mobile had some interesing design decisions with text, and particularly nice large menus that... were so big they didnt fit the screen. best stuff I've seen in UI design for like ever since.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  iOS text editing with the tap and hold to move cursor is a nightmare, and couple that with its extremely poor spelling correction which I have to go to google with the misspelled word amd have it predict instead
• m3kw9 3y ago
  What they need is extra keys to move cursor by word, cut and paste. The tap and wait for menu sucks. You just need good old kb emulation for those things.
• airstrike 3y ago
  This is an opportune time as any to mention that TextEditor on SwiftUI doesn't have a placeholder field... smh https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/texteditor https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/texteditor
• ellis0n 3y ago
  I've been using a mobile device for programming since 2012 and I developed a mobile text editor and screen keyboard that I use myself. I think I have the richest experience here. The problem is that the people who create mobile input interfaces developed them on a computer in order to make a “product” for a company, not for people. This is also due to patents and other problems not related to this task like "It’s not the flashy feature that shifts your Net Promoter Scores"
• larodi 3y ago
  maybe voice commands, will after all, catch up properly with LLMs now. but who really wants to talk to Her on a daily basis, I doubt to many sane people.
• squarefoot 3y ago
  Text editing done right requires either a true keyboard to manipulate it, or true AI that understands every small nuance one might want to apply to a text. Unfortunately until AI catches up, the best tool we could use for text is a real keyboard, or a virtual one that doesn't suffer from the lack of usable space of mobile devices, which would probably make use of an external wearable, possibly BT connected, device. Years ago I thought of one shaped as an "ergonomic potato" that uses a few keys (3 or 4) and an accelerometer for hand orientation detection, so that one could use a mix of the key combination and hand position to rotate and find the right char/symbol on a virtual ball-printer-head-like "thing" shown on the screen. I never went beyond the "what if" stage; the contraption would probably work, but would also be too cumbersome to use.
• ilteris 3y ago
  You cannot edit much on a virtual keyboard imo. That's where BlackBerry and sidekick excelled but and touch screens would always be subpar. It's a tradeoff.
• wizofaus 3y ago
  No mention of "undo"? That's usually my biggest bug bear, no way to undo accidentally deleted/garbled edits. Oh and the fact that intended deletion of half a sentence via backspace often ends up deleting far more than intended.
  • kelchm 3y ago
    Not sure about Android, but on iOS a three finger tap will bring up a contextual menu which allows undo and redo, among other actions.
    • dfinninger 3y ago
      Or just shaking your iPhone for undo.
      • wizofaus 3y ago
        I tried that with an iPad once - if there's a way to do so without looking faintly ridiculous I'm all ears. But I'm an Android person as far as phones go, lack of a standard system wise undo command isn't quite enough to send me back to Apple.
        • rifty 3y ago
          My solution to this would be to enable the Assistive Touch button and set its double tap action to 'shake'. If you don't want the button all the time, create a personal automation shortcut which runs when a specific app opens and closes, setting Assistive Touch on and off as you wish. Alternatively have Voice Control enabled and say "undo that". There is also a three finger gesture: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/27/new-ipados-button-bar-offers-a-shortcut-for-three-finger-gestures https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/27/new-ipados-button...
    • harrisi 3y ago
      I've been wondering what I'm supposed to do with my third thumb. /s I just tried using this in a text screen. My first attempt was on the keyboard which added random characters and brought up the little thing at the top to undo, my second attempt was above the keyboard, but my most recent message was a link so I got taken to safari, and my third attempt in a small sliver of the message screen in the upper left worked. Obviously if you're familiar with it, it's easier to do, but I rarely have three fingers available while I'm writing text on a phone.
• ncr100 3y ago
  Is a case for disruption: > Text editing on mobile was considered “good enough.” Since people weren’t complaining, there was little motivation to improve it. Put it another way, "make things better" just because they can be made better.
• mFixman 3y ago
  It seems like a complicated solution to a reasonable problem. Text editing involves a pop-up keyboard. Why not add a menu with arrow keys, selection toggles, and copy/cut/paste there?
• wizofaus 3y ago
  Surely it's going to need hardware innovations (e.g the ability to "roll out" a larger keyboard) for text editing on mobile devices to even come close to the desktop computing experience?
• Nition 3y ago
  > We saw this in our user testing when users tried to place the text cursor accurately: they would miss by a few characters... One small thing: I don't know how it works on Android, but I used to have an N9 and then the Jolla phone and you could tap anywhere in text to place the cursor there. iOS doesn't let you, except confusingly on the very first tap that activates the cursor. For subsequent taps, you can tap exactly where you want in the middle of a word and it always snaps the cursor to the start or end of that word. I'm pretty good at aiming at the right character to edit even with big fingers on a small screen. Let me do it!
  • satvikpendem 3y ago
    Hold down the space bar and you can move the cursor wherever you want, also on Android. I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.
    • alas_coo 3y ago
      How am I only discovering this now..
    • inetknght 3y ago
      > I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature. If only apps and phones had a manual to describe the functionality available...
    • marzipanWhale 3y ago
      I know about this in Swiftkey, but since I'm using more than one language, this action is used to change languages instead. It's unfortunate because moving the cursor is very useful.
      • d0100 3y ago
        Swipe changes the language but a long press activates the cursor in Android
    • Nition 3y ago
• Sloppy 3y ago
  Very nice ideas, please please please someone pick this up! Doing anything on a mobile device is far more painful than people assume. A generation of people are now unfamiliar with using a PC and although it has its problems, the use cases are far easier. Are these really solved cases? - multiple tabs in a browser. Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the desktop (errr mobile top?) - apps in general, why do they exist at all? Most are just slightly better web pages--ok I know it's just to give Apple&Google gatekeeper status and create a way to get paid for the app. but at a cost to users that is more and more annoying. Why have a mobile aware NYTimes.com AND an app? Ditch the apps where not really needed and do a decent one-page web app instead. No need to update, no special gatekeeper for install. If the first issue was solved, it would make mobile devices easier. I have no sympathy for the Mush burdened x-twitter but if they have a gripe with Apple do a decent web page and no gatekeeper is involved. - &^&%$#$$% passwords. Partly because of apps in general, all your passwords are hidden from your password manager, which is of dubious value on a mobile to begin with. Typing in that auto-generated password created by a password manager is HELL on a mobile device, text being hell as this article points out.
  • forgotpwd16 3y ago
    >Why not put tabs/shortcuts on the desktop You mean why tabs are part of the browser rather the system? Kinda like the suckless way and utilizing tabbed to provide tabs to any app?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • kurthr 3y ago
    Please add some form of controllable undo. Not some weird shake dialog (iOS), or complete absence (Android).
• sheep-a 3y ago
  [flagged]
• kazinator 3y ago
  > Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. Vim is usable, with Hacker's Keyboard (Android keyboard app that gives a full on-screen keyboard) or a Bluetooth keyboard. The Vim paradigm solves the problem of not having a mouse or menu bars, since it doesn't rely on them.
• livrem 3y ago
  I mostly just use emacs in termux. I think vim makes more sense to be honest, since the modal edit mode is perfect for touch screens, but I do not know it well enough. Keyboard-combos in emacs are not great without a real keyboard, but at least I know what to press and it is often possible to navigate around using very few key-presses with some thinking and things like avy-mode.
• Rediscover 3y ago
  I have termux (terminal emulator) installed on my android devices and make heavy use of sed(1) to edit then cat the text out, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into text messages, email, ... Works well for me. vi, cat, or emacs to generate the original text.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  People produce less text with more errors in more time on mobile. I actively avoid having to type anything on mobile. If I have my laptop open, I'll use whatsapp or signal on that. I often wait replying on either of those until I get my laptop. Just way less frustrating to not have to correct >25% of my key presses. If I have to use the mobile keyboard, I'll often just send a message with typos, no capitals, and skip some of the more redundant words. It seems lots of people do that. Phones just suck for text input. Longform text entering on a phone is by and large not a thing for most people. It's mostly a read only device for passively consuming news and media. And taking photos. I find it telling that one of the more popular addons for ipads are covers with a builtin keyboard. It's a way bigger device than an iphone. But yet the keyboard sucks enough that Apple sells covers with a keyboard. Of course, all the touchscreen keyboard problems that the ipad has are magnified on their iphone. Yet, they don't have a solution for that. And they also sell a stylus for the ipad. Because fingers lack precision. It's the same OS but there seem to be no such options for the iphone. Does the stylus even work with an iphone? Is that deliberate? It's not like people are going to be magically more precise on an iphone relative to a huge ipad. Conclusion, Apple just accepts that that's the way things are. And besides, Steve Jobs would turn in his grave if they dared to ship an iphone with a stylus. Hardware keyboards on phones used to be a thing. I worked at Nokia back in the day. Really nice keyboards. Blackberries were popular too. People wrote lots of stuff on those things. I wouldn't mind a little pocket laptop. It's not like my pixel 6 is small or subtle in my pocket. It would be more useful with a slide out keyboard.
  • SamuelAdams 3y ago
    This take is a little ironic. In the original iPhone keynote address [1], Steve Jobs specifically called out physical keyboards as a negative user experience. The advantage of the iPhone is that the entire device could adapt to whatever application you were currently using. That being said I still think you are right. Typing on iOS could be improved. [1]: https://youtu.be/x7qPAY9JqE4?si=9_jnM2Ys8JiTXGqC https://youtu.be/x7qPAY9JqE4?si=9_jnM2Ys8JiTXGqC
    • awinter-py 3y ago
      I would say this vision could be realized if the iphone were able to grow a physical keyboard, and until then the entire device of the blackberry is more adapted to the applications I am using
• jll29 3y ago
  Writing/editing worked fine on my Blackberry. It's the people who introduced the glass surface keyboards that are the root of the editing evil. Cursor keys to edit, a scroll wheel to navigate one's inbox, it was a dream that "they" stole from us with RIM's demise.
  • Waterluvian 3y ago
    I’m so much faster with touch than I ever was on my BB. But your comment made me realize how much I’d love a jog wheel where my right index finger rests (top right side) while my thumbs are typing. I’d use it for adjusting the cursor location or press in to select a word for replacement. Ooouhhh… imagining this already feels right.
    • function_seven 3y ago
      What you're describing is how my very first cellphone (a Sony PCS phone, model CM-B1201SPR) operated. It was awesome, and I distinctly remember the mini-grieving I did when I replaced that phone with a Nokia. Snake was cool, but I missed that jog wheel! And yeah, imagining it already feels right to me as well. I just picked up my iPhone and imagined how cool it would be if Apple took their digital crown, flipped it sideways, and submerged it into the edge of the phone. Sure, waterproofing might be tricky, but they figure that out for other penetrations through the case, so I have faith.
• bawolff 3y ago
  I think this is a major cause of wikipedia not attracting new contributors like it used to.
• somethingsome 3y ago
  I use my phone extensively for writing and I must say I dont experience that much hassle in writing. Only two points: 1. The autocorrect is the worst part and the only real struggle as it often change the word not logically with the previous words (softkey) or it doesn't know the correct conjugation and changes it. Finally, the menu shortcut is way too close to the letter 'a' and I can't stop hitting it. 2. On the ergonomy side, only 'select text' is problematic for me, but not the long press + cursors, that's okay, it's more about cursors themselves when they reach the edges of the screen when I select whole paragraphs. I often find that I can't select the first letters. Therefore, I always need to select some letters from the paragraph above and remove, or select less and rewrite.. Another problem with it is selecting very big chunks of text, I would love a click somewhere + 'shift' click elsewhere to select all the text. Finally, the 'Semantic' web doesn't help sometimes when I can't select several paragraphs because they are not in the same Semantic unit. I the past I was carrying with me a small Bluetooth keyboard that could switch with a button between my phone and my tablet, but finally, writing on the phone was good enough. I have way less good experiences with writing code on the phone or interacting with a ssh session.
• diegoperini 3y ago
  Now that we have foldables, I see no reason not to put a hardware keyboard to the bottom of one of the screens while the phone is unfolded.
  • TheRealPomax 3y ago
    "In which language?" And now you have another problem to solve.
• russellbeattie 3y ago
  GBoard has the text-editing view of the keyboard which is nice for longer/more accurate selection. But it would be nice if there was a universal standard and a way to bring that view up for non editable text. Also, undo.
• throwaway290 3y ago
  > This creates our first ambiguity. The text handle is itself a tap target. Unfortunately, so is the text surrounding it. We now have two potential tap targets. When they are far apart, it’s fine. The problem only occurs when I want to tap just to the left or right of the text cursor. In this case, it’s unclear what the user wants: to move the cursor or to tap/drag the handle. This used to work perfectly on iOS until iOS 17. You could hold and drag text handle or you could double tap to select text around it and then drag selection handles. Now select-dragging a handle in place was made impossible, I don't know why.