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Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS versi

Typing and editing text has worked perfectly (with and without a proper keyboard) for many years on iDevices, until Apple broke it in the most recent OS version. Some major change, apparently related to spellchecker, hinders cursor movement now and results in entire words being unintentionally selected all the time. (PSA: if the recent change annoys you to no end, as it did me, you can get back the previous editing behavior by turning off spellchecker in OS settings.) Not counting source code, I type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it. > Think about how long it takes/ho many steps it takes to put quotes around a chunk of text; to correct a misspelling; to rearrange some words. None of those are slow. You know you can: 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor? 2) long tap (and drag if desired) to do the same ignoring word boundaries? 3) hold spacebar to move the cursor around the text? Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all? Yes, if you like pain and insist on typing on a screen keyboard (I guess I do), certain text adjustments would be marginally slower than with a hardware keyboard, but on the other hand if you normally type English then swipe-typing more than compensates for that.

eptcyka 2y ago
It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
  - anileated 2y ago
    You don’t actually need to hold, just a three-finger tap (anywhere on screen, except keyboard itself) is enough.
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      Ooh, this is a neat trick, thanks!
      - anileated 2y ago
        Personally, I almost never use it since I often operate single-handed and it is not part of my muscle memory. Tapping the cursor then waiting a second or so for regular context menu (with lookup, translate and other options) is my preferred way.
- anileated 2y ago
  > It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste > I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos. Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17. However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version. > why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)
- pcammeraat 2y ago
  If you tap and hold on the spacebar it essential becomes a trackpad. That let you move the cursor in all directions.
  - anileated 2y ago
    That doesn’t help with selection, does it?
    - nativeit 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - anileated 2y ago
        > Relax. Go select some text with a mouse, you’ll feel better. Do you often select text to feel better? Are you OK?
        saagarjha 2y ago
        Look I don’t agree with your parent comment but, uh, yes I do. Do you not mindlessly select text while reading?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - lbebber 2y ago
      You can select text this way too; once it’s in “trackpad mode”, tap the keyboard with another finger, and it will start text selection.
      - dgellow 2y ago
        Wow, I had no idea! But the selection is not fluid at all and really difficult this way
- maccard 2y ago
  > It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options. > On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.
chongli 2y ago
Thank you so much for the PSA. I have been in and out of the keyboard settings screen many times since the update but could not find what was causing the single-tap word selection. Jeeez, talk about an unbelievably annoying feature. Especially bad is how tapping anywhere after the last word in a text area gets interpreted as tapping ON that word, making it impossible to return to the end of an open paragraph with single-tap cursor movement.
- anileated 2y ago
  Glad it helped. I’m with you, remembering how it was after I freshly updated but before I figured this out is giving me unpleasant flashbacks.
the_other 2y ago
> 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor? This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text. 2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.
- interpol_p 2y ago
  It’s not arbitrary, it’s intentional (though you and I may hate it) The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/ https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/ Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    I love Codea! I bought it just to play around with it!
    - interpol_p 2y ago
      Thank you! We build Codea in our spare time, evenings and on weekends. It’s a really rewarding project
- anileated 2y ago
  Can’t reproduce any of the issues you describe. Perhaps you are using iOS 17 with spellchecker enabled? Read my comment fully.
eviks 2y ago
> type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it. Yes you would just like a lot of other people do - because the device is truly portable, so you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode > Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all? No it won't, I've changed those bad defaults with macos-only apps > You know you can Yes I do, and still agree with the OP that the software support is bad and none of the things you list are properly engineered despite the fact that direct analogue finger input has great potential
- anileated 2y ago
  > you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode If it was as awfully inconvenient as some here claim, I would reply to comments or write emails on my laptop. It simply is not.
  - eviks 2y ago
    And if you meant awful inconvenience you should've said so in the previous comment. It simply is ... inconvenient, much more so than with a regular keyboard, but not as awful as to make it completely impractical, so the other benefits can outweigh it and result in plenty of phone typing
    - anileated 2y ago
      > you should've said so in the previous comment See the comment I originally replied to. “Horrifically broken”, “many steps” and so on. Also, for me it is often about as fast to type as with a hardware keyboard thanks to swipe typing. Perhaps I think slow enough that it’s not a bottleneck. Pity you all fast thinkers, I suppose. Editing is sometimes a bit slower, but also depends.
gcanyon 2y ago
1. Open Messages 2. Open any conversation 3. Type "This is going to hurt" 4. Now, in one "tap anywhere," place the cursor after the word "is" Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. It's possible to select after "is" -- for example, you can select after "going" if you're careful (I'd say you have to tap around the "n") Of course I know about the long tap -- as I said, I've been doing roughly that since at least the deep press days. Open Safari, go to a typically long Amazon URL, and try to get to the end of the URL to edit something. Depending on the URL length, it requires: 1. Tap quickly so the whole URL isn't selected (otherwise you'll drag it) Then multiple cycles of: 1. Long tap 2. Drag to the right 3. Reach the end of the screen, but not the URL 4. Back to (1) The spacebar is the same as the long tap. It's better than nothing, but not sufficient. And adding a keyboard doesn't fix the fundamental issue that Apple hasn't thought deeply about this. Swipe-typing is a blessing and a curse. Think about what you have to do if: 1. You want to add an "s" to pluralize something 2. You just need to change the last letter or two 3. You want to add any other character right after the word besides the limited set Apple has deemed worthy of special treatment And that is: 1. Type space 2. Type backspace 3. Type the actual thing you want to type That's three actions to do one thing. And that doesn't even begin to cover how swipe typing handles alternatives: backspace and do it over? Really? How about automatically popping up alternatives for selection (and then dismissing if the user keeps swiping)? I'm happy for you that you're happy. I'm not. Apple: hire me and I'll make this better. :-)
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. That's optimal for the "insert a word" use case. What would you have it do?
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    What if I need to type "too"? More to the point, with longer words it's entirely possible to put the insertion point after that word. The shorter the word is, the harder it is to do, until at some point it is impossible (? maybe I need smaller fingers?). That alternative use case just fades into impossibility (again, maybe) without explanation or guidance. To be clear: I'm not saying that every choice Apple has made is the opposite of what makes sense. I'm saying that in many cases they could have increased usability, and that overall usability is bad enough that editing is painful, substantially slower than on other platforms (MacOS) and that I think there are at least some use cases they could address, but they haven't.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
publicmail 2y ago
Another annoyance for me is when trying to move the cursor to the end of a long text box like the URL bar in Safari. You basically have to keep using the “hold space bar” method and swiping one inch at a time. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but I haven’t found it yet.
- anileated 2y ago
  I find that dragging the cursor to the right is fast enough. However, removing that initial selection of the entire URL takes a couple of frustrating extra taps. Removing complete selection in a single-line input is a weak point of editing experience on iOS (it is easy in a textarea since you have space to just tap away).
swozey 2y ago
I'm on my first iphone (13) after decades with android/bb/nokia and I cannot explain how much I loathe typing on this thing. It's like it actively goes out of my way to make me not want to copy/paste/edit urls, etc. I also have a terrible time hitting the correct letters and I have scrawny salad fingers. Every iPhone super user I'm surrounded by (everyone) never talks about how awful the typing experience is and makes me feel like a luddite for not doing it well. I wasn't sure if they were just used to it or they just know how to use it correctly and I don't. It's horrible. It's helped me a lot to stop pulling my phone out to use social media/web etc to pass time because if I can't click it, if i have to type in a URL or anything like that, I just don't want to even try.
- anileated 2y ago
  Perhaps the reason they do not talk about it is because they find it convenient, like me. Could be adjustment period, or you need to play with your keyboard settings (spellchecker and so on). I find typing extremely easy and fast for the most part, except when swipe-typing gets the wrong word.
- seec 2y ago
  They don't, it's part of the "believer" persona where they will excuse anything and everything, thinking that since it is so expensive and gives so much status that it can't be bad or wrong. The state of things is appalling, some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard than the most expensive Apple phones (you get a proper number row in the first place, avoiding extremely annoying switching when working with numbers). And I say that as someone who bought the first iPhone (literally imported it before it was even available in France), when the hardware was so superior to anything else on the market that it didn't matter as much that the software could be lacking in some ways. Nowadays the hardware is still good (overpriced, at least in France) but the software is bad/annoying/lacking on so many levels it's just insane that Apple keeps getting away with selling so many expensive devices with deeply flawed software. But there has been a slowdown in sales and their chip leadership doesn't matter as much as it used to (at least in phones), so maybe they will start improving their stuff. One can only hope.

eptcyka 2y ago

It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste - why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? Similarly, I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Moving the cursor is similarly infuriating. On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? Wouldn't be as big of a problem if the spellchecker was not absolute garbage and handled multi-language text input, or just worked well for a single language. Honestly, I don't think the team working on the keyboard at apple has any linguists or any kind of diversity to pay attention to nothing but the most milktoast of English language use.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard? You can tap and hold with three fingers to bring up the clipboard bar which has icons for undo, redo, cut, copy, and paste. Assuming that's what you mean by "access the clipboard"?
- anileated 2y ago
  You don’t actually need to hold, just a three-finger tap (anywhere on screen, except keyboard itself) is enough.
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    Ooh, this is a neat trick, thanks!
    - anileated 2y ago
      Personally, I almost never use it since I often operate single-handed and it is not part of my muscle memory. Tapping the cursor then waiting a second or so for regular context menu (with lookup, translate and other options) is my preferred way.
anileated 2y ago
> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste > I often find it impossible to drag a selection to select more or less characters. Your description reminds me of how it felt after that recent OS update I mentioned, until I realized I can turn off spellchecker to restore the previous typing behaviour. Now the copy/paste popover and drag-selection work every time, but I have to really watch for typos. Like me, you were used to previous behaviour, and the new one is unfamiliar to the point of broken. I agree that Apple has royally screwed up here by making this the default behavior in iOS 17. However, it’s a bit disingenuous to say it was always broken if it only started working differently in the latest version. > why isn't there a keyboard shortcut to access the clipboard On iPad, if you bring up a large keyboard by pinch-zooming the small one, you get those buttons on screen keyboard. (On an external keyboard, the normal macOS copy-paste key combos work always.)
pcammeraat 2y ago
If you tap and hold on the spacebar it essential becomes a trackpad. That let you move the cursor in all directions.
- anileated 2y ago
  That doesn’t help with selection, does it?
  - nativeit 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - anileated 2y ago
      > Relax. Go select some text with a mouse, you’ll feel better. Do you often select text to feel better? Are you OK?
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Look I don’t agree with your parent comment but, uh, yes I do. Do you not mindlessly select text while reading?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - lbebber 2y ago
    You can select text this way too; once it’s in “trackpad mode”, tap the keyboard with another finger, and it will start text selection.
    - dgellow 2y ago
      Wow, I had no idea! But the selection is not fluid at all and really difficult this way
maccard 2y ago
> It takes me repeated taps on a text entry to get the popover that allows me to paste I copy and pasted this on an iPhone - I tapped the comment box which summoned the keyboard, and I tapped again and it gave me Paste/Autofill as options. > On Android, I had a keyboard that allowed me to swipe on the space bar to move the cursor, why can't I have that here? This is out of the box functionality on iOS. I had a samsung device before, and I had no end of issues with the keyboard failing to summon, certain apps refusing to use my preferred keyboard, password managers not working properly, inconsistent selection/focus/edit dialog behaviour. I don't get _any_ of those issues with iOS.

chongli 2y ago

Thank you so much for the PSA. I have been in and out of the keyboard settings screen many times since the update but could not find what was causing the single-tap word selection. Jeeez, talk about an unbelievably annoying feature. Especially bad is how tapping anywhere after the last word in a text area gets interpreted as tapping ON that word, making it impossible to return to the end of an open paragraph with single-tap cursor movement.

anileated 2y ago
Glad it helped. I’m with you, remembering how it was after I freshly updated but before I figured this out is giving me unpleasant flashbacks.

the_other 2y ago

> 1) tap anywhere in text to move the cursor? This behaviour is a mess, IME. iOS makes arbitrary judgements about the word boundary it thinks I'm aiming at and is about 50% wrong. I regularly find words or lines it will refuse to position the cursor into, instead insisting on moving to the line above or below. Line breaks seem to confuse it too. I often have to position the cursor the word before the line break, insert my new text and then reposition to delete the old text. 2) + 3) The rhythm to engage this vs the one to engage selection is completely opaque to me. I still don't know how to engage selection intentionally, successfully. I've owned iPhones since the 3s.

interpol_p 2y ago
It’s not arbitrary, it’s intentional (though you and I may hate it) The default UITextInputStringTokenizer prefers to place the caret at word boundaries. I implemented exact placement for my coding app, Codea, and wrote about the text system extensively here: https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/ https://sim.coffee/textual-healing/ Exact caret placement is actually surprisingly effective with a reasonable font size. I wish Apple offered it as a preference system-wide Selection defaults to a double-tap to select at the word granularity. Triple tap will select at the paragraph granularity. This is customisable in your own apps, though the system defaults to the one specific to your current language
- gcanyon 2y ago
  I love Codea! I bought it just to play around with it!
  - interpol_p 2y ago
    Thank you! We build Codea in our spare time, evenings and on weekends. It’s a really rewarding project
anileated 2y ago
Can’t reproduce any of the issues you describe. Perhaps you are using iOS 17 with spellchecker enabled? Read my comment fully.

eviks 2y ago

> type more text on a screen on either iPad or iPhone these days than any other way. If it was not convenient, I wouldn’t be doing it. Yes you would just like a lot of other people do - because the device is truly portable, so you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode > Finally, you know if you type a lot you can connect your favorite mechanical keyboard and it will work just like it does on Mac, with Emacs-like movement combos and all? No it won't, I've changed those bad defaults with macos-only apps > You know you can Yes I do, and still agree with the OP that the software support is bad and none of the things you list are properly engineered despite the fact that direct analogue finger input has great potential

anileated 2y ago
> you can suffer more inconvenience to use it everywhere to communicate in immediate mode If it was as awfully inconvenient as some here claim, I would reply to comments or write emails on my laptop. It simply is not.
- eviks 2y ago
  And if you meant awful inconvenience you should've said so in the previous comment. It simply is ... inconvenient, much more so than with a regular keyboard, but not as awful as to make it completely impractical, so the other benefits can outweigh it and result in plenty of phone typing
  - anileated 2y ago
    > you should've said so in the previous comment See the comment I originally replied to. “Horrifically broken”, “many steps” and so on. Also, for me it is often about as fast to type as with a hardware keyboard thanks to swipe typing. Perhaps I think slow enough that it’s not a bottleneck. Pity you all fast thinkers, I suppose. Editing is sometimes a bit slower, but also depends.

gcanyon 2y ago

1. Open Messages 2. Open any conversation 3. Type "This is going to hurt" 4. Now, in one "tap anywhere," place the cursor after the word "is" Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. It's possible to select after "is" -- for example, you can select after "going" if you're careful (I'd say you have to tap around the "n") Of course I know about the long tap -- as I said, I've been doing roughly that since at least the deep press days. Open Safari, go to a typically long Amazon URL, and try to get to the end of the URL to edit something. Depending on the URL length, it requires: 1. Tap quickly so the whole URL isn't selected (otherwise you'll drag it) Then multiple cycles of: 1. Long tap 2. Drag to the right 3. Reach the end of the screen, but not the URL 4. Back to (1) The spacebar is the same as the long tap. It's better than nothing, but not sufficient. And adding a keyboard doesn't fix the fundamental issue that Apple hasn't thought deeply about this. Swipe-typing is a blessing and a curse. Think about what you have to do if: 1. You want to add an "s" to pluralize something 2. You just need to change the last letter or two 3. You want to add any other character right after the word besides the limited set Apple has deemed worthy of special treatment And that is: 1. Type space 2. Type backspace 3. Type the actual thing you want to type That's three actions to do one thing. And that doesn't even begin to cover how swipe typing handles alternatives: backspace and do it over? Really? How about automatically popping up alternatives for selection (and then dismissing if the user keeps swiping)? I'm happy for you that you're happy. I'm not. Apple: hire me and I'll make this better. :-)

CharlesW 2y ago
> Spoiler -- the cursor will be before the word "going," after the space. That's optimal for the "insert a word" use case. What would you have it do?
- gcanyon 2y ago
  What if I need to type "too"? More to the point, with longer words it's entirely possible to put the insertion point after that word. The shorter the word is, the harder it is to do, until at some point it is impossible (? maybe I need smaller fingers?). That alternative use case just fades into impossibility (again, maybe) without explanation or guidance. To be clear: I'm not saying that every choice Apple has made is the opposite of what makes sense. I'm saying that in many cases they could have increased usability, and that overall usability is bad enough that editing is painful, substantially slower than on other platforms (MacOS) and that I think there are at least some use cases they could address, but they haven't.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

publicmail 2y ago

Another annoyance for me is when trying to move the cursor to the end of a long text box like the URL bar in Safari. You basically have to keep using the “hold space bar” method and swiping one inch at a time. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but I haven’t found it yet.

anileated 2y ago
I find that dragging the cursor to the right is fast enough. However, removing that initial selection of the entire URL takes a couple of frustrating extra taps. Removing complete selection in a single-line input is a weak point of editing experience on iOS (it is easy in a textarea since you have space to just tap away).

swozey 2y ago

I'm on my first iphone (13) after decades with android/bb/nokia and I cannot explain how much I loathe typing on this thing. It's like it actively goes out of my way to make me not want to copy/paste/edit urls, etc. I also have a terrible time hitting the correct letters and I have scrawny salad fingers. Every iPhone super user I'm surrounded by (everyone) never talks about how awful the typing experience is and makes me feel like a luddite for not doing it well. I wasn't sure if they were just used to it or they just know how to use it correctly and I don't. It's horrible. It's helped me a lot to stop pulling my phone out to use social media/web etc to pass time because if I can't click it, if i have to type in a URL or anything like that, I just don't want to even try.

anileated 2y ago
Perhaps the reason they do not talk about it is because they find it convenient, like me. Could be adjustment period, or you need to play with your keyboard settings (spellchecker and so on). I find typing extremely easy and fast for the most part, except when swipe-typing gets the wrong word.
seec 2y ago
They don't, it's part of the "believer" persona where they will excuse anything and everything, thinking that since it is so expensive and gives so much status that it can't be bad or wrong. The state of things is appalling, some cheap Android phones give better experience with typing/keyboard than the most expensive Apple phones (you get a proper number row in the first place, avoiding extremely annoying switching when working with numbers). And I say that as someone who bought the first iPhone (literally imported it before it was even available in France), when the hardware was so superior to anything else on the market that it didn't matter as much that the software could be lacking in some ways. Nowadays the hardware is still good (overpriced, at least in France) but the software is bad/annoying/lacking on so many levels it's just insane that Apple keeps getting away with selling so many expensive devices with deeply flawed software. But there has been a slowdown in sales and their chip leadership doesn't matter as much as it used to (at least in phones), so maybe they will start improving their stuff. One can only hope.