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.
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.
> 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.
I agree with your general point but there's nothing inherently bad about the smartphones themselves. They are perfectly good computers, it's these big corporations who turn them into locked down approved content consumption machines. We shouldn't be dismissing these computers just because of that, we should be working to empower ourselves to use them to the fullest with projects like postmarketOS.
I'm waiting for the new Pixel to come out so I can buy it and run grapheneOS on it. Then I'll try to port postmarketOS to my current phone.
Because using my phone while lying down in bed or sitting in my couch is so much more comfortable than using a bulky laptop or personal computer while sitting in a chair. I've written way too much code inside Termux. It's gotten to the point I only use my laptop to edit open street map now.
I'm looking for a way to build new Android apps inside Termux itself. Wonder if anyone here's managed it.
I wrote programs on my calculator in high school, an ostensibly narrowly focused device with computing power generously estimated at well under 1% that of your phone, made by a company that didn't really give two shits about their device's programming community.
Therefore, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that if someone as dedicated as you is struggling to write programs for your phone, on your phone, it's because you're being actively discouraged from doing so. Demand better! As a consumer the only voice you have is your wallet. Can you not find a real computer that's comfortable to use in bed?
> Can you not find a real computer that's comfortable to use in bed?
Real computers are not made for that. I don't think there's a comfortable way to use a keyboard and mouse while lying down.
I had better luck trying to find a bed for use with computers instead of the other way around. Even that was extremely difficult. I'd need an over bed or zero gravity workstation that's more expensive than the computer itself. I can't justify this cost for my recreational programming.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
You actually can paste between words but it's hidden (like most things with mobile text editing) You need to place the text cursor between the words carefully, tap the 'teardrop' on the text handle, and that will bring up the menu to paste. (not saying that's good!)
Just tried this. I find tapping to bring up the teardrop sometimes changes the cursor position.
It's quite unfortunate the paste button is not always shown when editing. At least the teardrop (if not an edit bar) should be shown when using long press spacebar to move the cursor.
What if I don't want the keyboard monitoring my clipboard? Nothing should be monitoring my clipboard. If I choose to paste from the clicked, at that point you can look at it, not before.
There are copy/paste buttons on Gboard, but they're kind of hidden. Press the 4 squares in the top left of the keyboard and select Text Editing. You get arrow keys, a button for toggling select, and cut/copy/paste. In a way it's like switching out of insert mode in vim.
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...
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
I really like the additional controls AnySoftKeyboard[1] brings: I like to configure it so that it always displays a left/right arrow above the keyboard to move the cursor. And if you "lift" (gesture up) the space key, there is an additional copy/paste (with clipboard manager)/arrows/selection/undo/redo/etc menu, which is quite useful[2].
Unfortunately I stopped using it in favor of OpenBoard[3] due to subpar autocorrect, especially when typing in French[4].
I'll have to try OpenBoard. Right now I'm using ASK and I really want to like it, but it's just slightly too janky and rigid. The customizability is nowhere near good enough. There's too many behaviors that seem hardcoded and impossible to change. Like when my battery is below 15%, autocorrect and haptics are turned off. Who thought that was a good idea?! Now my phone is almost useless for typing when the battery is low.
I agree, URL editing is infuriating especially with long URLs with massive tracking query strings (e.g. anything opened from Facebook). But not only. Sometimes I want to change subdomain of a long URL (e.g. from reddit to old.reddit) and it requires a lot of scrolling to the left.
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.
> 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.
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.
There is this website, nngroup.com that used to be a popular reference on UX matters. They wrote lots of articles about how they tested using computers by mouse instead of keyboard and that mousing was loads better and had wide-ranging conclusions about UX from this. But the studies turned out to have actually been things like ‘replace all letter ‘e’s in this sentence with ‘|’ symbols’ and using the keyboard meant arrow keys and backspace rather than using a find-and-replace function. So sure, mice are better than cursor keys at selecting lots of letter ‘e’s and editing them, but one would hope that such a description is not representative of actual computer use and so not a good foundation on which to base general UX conclusions.
It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so implicitly optimising for) things that don’t matter, one is potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things that do matter without helping things that don’t.
More realistic scenarios could be:
- successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical mobile text-input mechanisms struggle.
- edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs.
- reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity.
- add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this right now).
I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but people didn’t particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its ‘killer app’.
[1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online but I think the complaint is quite niche.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I really doubt people are every going to give up big stand-alone monitors.
Putting cellphones on big standalone monitors might work. But in that case, we’ll probably also need to attach a pointing device and some way of entering text, so from a UI point of view, we’ve got a desktop.
Cellphones definitely have sufficient processing power for lots of typical office workloads nowadays… but using them in this way doesn’t seem to have caught on.
I dunno, eventually this sort of discussion ends up at “why didn’t DeX take over the world,” a question for which I have no good answers, since, like everyone else, I never tried it out.
I occasionally use DeX. It is fine, if you are needing to read email, browse the web, or do simple word processing, or need a touch interface for drawing. If I'm going to sit down and work for multiple hours, I'd rather be using my desktop applications.
No, the aforementioned users do not need to write lots of text on mobile devices - a professional writer will choose or adapt their devices and environment to best suit the needs of their writing work, not adapt their writing to better suit the limitations of the devices; instead it's all the "casual" users who need to make do with whatever device they have on hand even if that device was optimized for entirely different needs.
Sadly, no. There certainly are lots of novel keyboards out there that can be googled up, but perhaps the kinds of features that would make a vim/modal-type keyboard be interesting and useful on mobile require further API hooks into the standard text-input controls (to be able to do things like find word and line boundaries, perform complex selections and replacements, etc).
I wonder if ultimately, the advantages of a "stay on the home row" philosophy like vim has just don't really manifest when there's no longer a physical keyboard as the underlying HMI. But the core idea of doing something modal and separating movement/selection from input does still feel valuable.
On an iPhone if you hold the space bar down the whole keyboard becomes a kind of trackpad which you can use to move the cursor.
Since all the keys disappear, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select text or paste in a specific spot in that “mode”.
Right now it’s so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.
You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did not have to wait for the long press to register.
I frequently use the selection, but I don't like the implementation of it. Rather than the selection being between the starting "anchor" point and your moving cursor's position, the cursor you're moving around just creates an ever-growing selection that can't be subtracted from. So if you're e.g. selecting across multiple lines and you bring the cursor up to the line above, it'll select everything from the starting point to where the cursor is now, but if you bring it back down it doesn't unselect that text. So if you accidentally select something you didn't want to, the selection is essentially ruined and you need to start over. I have no idea why they implemented it like this.
Selection was introduced at the same time as “space bar cursor”, which is with the introduction of 3D Touch in the iPhone 6s.
Actually, it wasn’t even a “space bar cursor”, as the way of triggering it was with force pressing and not by holding the space bar. It works much better with 3D Touch, as you can move the cursor around and press harder without lifting to start selecting, then release a bit to stop. My iPhone 8 can still do it, and I’m really going to miss it when I upgrade.
Unfortunately this affordance isn’t available when trying to make a selection in noneditable text.
Since often on mobile devices I am responding to comment threads (in slack or gitlab or Jira, or indeed right now on HN, for example) the challenges I have in copy-pasting are often in grabbing text from a prior comment to quote, rather than in selecting my own text.
To be fair you can't drop a caret (the edit cursor) into non-editable text in most desktop applications as well. And that's a missed opportunity there too. I think Chrome got less agreesive in changing your selection to match word bounaries, but it was very annyone for a while. I think you could void it by holding Shift, but that had some other side-effects in some pages.
I think internet explorer did this selection thing at one point years ago. I don’t recall chrome doing it. Firefox used to have a ‘caret browsing’ feature but people didn’t use it so it was eventually removed. So I don’t really think it’s a missed opportunity so much as a feature people didn’t sufficiently love.
Thanks, that comes in very useful from time to time. I thought that got disabled.
Chrome did double checked that I know what I’m doing with a popup, I hope this is not a sign this will get deprecated.
Thanks. I don’t know how much RSI I’d be saved from if I knew this years ago. Apple, if you’re listening, you should advertise this better. Ok, maybe not for the new iPhone user, but maybe for a user in his 2nd year or one which does a lot of text input.
> You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard.
Doesn't appear to work.
What does work is pushing a little harder (i.e. "force touch") with the same finger/thumb that initiated the move-cursor-via-spacebar gesture.
Only problem there is that sometimes the forcetouch doesn't register (no matter how hard you pinch the screen), or is too trigger happy and starts selecting text when you only wanted to move the cursor.
What do you mean "tap somewhere else on the Keyboard?" Once I hold down the space bar and then let go, the keyboard disappears. And I just tried some combination of this and got into a frozen state where the keyboard was missing and I had to kill Safari.
In gboard we've already got modal stuff for numerical keypad, emojis, special characters (2 different modal pages), etc.
Adding one more modal keyboard page for cursor-editing (arrow keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, home/end, pgup/godown, select-toggle-button, delete, rclick menu) would just make sense. Would just be getting the rest of the desktop keyboard into the phone keyboard, nothing groundbreaking.
They already have an option to move your visit by dragging across spacebar. Why not just replace half of the oversized spacebar key with something useful?
Whoa, I had no idea (obviously). Note, that article is out of date, instead of the G icon, now it's a four-square icon. I don't know why they're not just using a standard hamburger icon, but whatever.
You can install blink shell, panic prompt, or whatever the popular iPhone ssh client of the day is and ssh over to your desktop to get a preview of how this would work.
Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it is fine IMO. The screen is a little bit small. Sometimes if I’m going to SSH from my phone, I’ll put the phone on a little stand in front of the keyboard, so it can sit more like a foot from my face, or whatever (normal cellphone usage distance). Or, I’ll put it in portrait mode farther away and think of it as “half a screen.”
Either way works fine for short stints. Nebulous concerns about eyeball heath for long sessions, although I have no real evidence to back that up, and we’re all screwed on that front anyway, right?
I had a Logitech Keys-to-go I was quite happy with but recently got myself this 60% mechanical keyboard, mostly because you can get it with a case that doubles as a phone & tablet stand
I've been using nvim in termux on foldable phone since I've bought phone in that form factor. It works great, I'm using "unexpected keyboard" as input method for faster special symbols access. It works pretty well. Good enough for me to program on the go.
Thanks for letting me know about the Unexpected Keyboard app. It'll take some getting used to, but having arrow keys and punctuation available without changing modes is pretty awesome.
I can even hit Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, etc. This alone will help text editing on my phone.
Seems to be quite an improvement. Thank you for the tip!
But it would be even better if it had "stylus mode" because, with a precision stylus, it's easier to tap directly alternate characters than to drag from the center of the button toward the needed variant.
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
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
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.
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!!
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!
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
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.
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.
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? ;-)
The KEYone and KEYtwo were Blackberry branded Android phones with a physical keyboard that had at least the scrolling ability. Unfortunately discontinued.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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...
If I'm remembering correctly the main difference is that it was fast -- the space bar cursor is fine but I do feel like I lost something that made my input on mobile better.
Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder.
Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait.
iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
When in an input field, you simply tap to place the cursor. If you need finer placement you use the spacebar. The tap works 90% of the time since you’re usually editing whole words.
Also, iOS has kept a software implementation of force touch around, even after removing the hardware: a hard press goes directly into cursor placement, it takes a bit more force than it used to. I imagine it’s a mix of gyroscopes and detecting a growing touch surface.
3D Touch capable models (6s to x) had actual pressure sensors embedded in the screen assembly, which meant there was another input channel (how hard you pressed) that apple mapped to an extra commands, like a right click. To highlight text with it, you could press slightly harder anywhere on the keyboard and that would start cursor movement mode (like holding on the spacebar on newer models), then, with the cursor on the word you wanted to start highlighting from, you pressed a bit harder and it would highlight from that word on until you released the keyboard.
Yes. It’s a long press, though, not 3D Touch or whatever they used to call it. Admittedly this got much better with the new shorter delay to activate long press in iOS 17.
It’s restricted to the space bar, too. IIRC it was much better on my old 6S.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, it is beyond ridiculous that the default keyboard doesn't have an undo button anywhere. Copy/paste take way too many taps too. I like the changes to cursor motion proposed in the article.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 575 ms ] thread- 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.
> Mobile devices were originally designed for consumption
... and will always be consumption devices.
A television isn't a substitute for your laptop either.
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.
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.
I'm waiting for the new Pixel to come out so I can buy it and run grapheneOS on it. Then I'll try to port postmarketOS to my current phone.
I'm looking for a way to build new Android apps inside Termux itself. Wonder if anyone here's managed it.
Therefore, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that if someone as dedicated as you is struggling to write programs for your phone, on your phone, it's because you're being actively discouraged from doing so. Demand better! As a consumer the only voice you have is your wallet. Can you not find a real computer that's comfortable to use in bed?
Real computers are not made for that. I don't think there's a comfortable way to use a keyboard and mouse while lying down.
I had better luck trying to find a bed for use with computers instead of the other way around. Even that was extremely difficult. I'd need an over bed or zero gravity workstation that's more expensive than the computer itself. I can't justify this cost for my recreational programming.
If a genie appeared and gave me one wish right now, I would wish for everyone in the world to get a free GPD Micro PC. Plus a spare one.
>> Why should we privilege an intentionally nerfed computing experience
How would "mov[ing] mobile forward" privilege mobile?
How would it impair your experience on your desktop?
That’s a false dichotomy.
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.
Once I have to scroll (vertically or, even worse, horizontally) in addition to moving the selection handles the UX is just terrible.
Thats my main biggest issue.
Also, why the fuck there no Copy/Paste buttons on mobile keyboard??
Edit: Ah, but then the teardrop goes away.
So I guess not really a solution. Sorry.
It's quite unfortunate the paste button is not always shown when editing. At least the teardrop (if not an edit bar) should be shown when using long press spacebar to move the cursor.
If you have something in clipboard:
1. Place your cursor
2. Yes, I know you fat-fingered the exact position. Drag on spacebar to slide the cursor around (Holy crap this is the most non-discoverable feature).
3. Press the clipboard button to show clipboard menu (or, if the clipboard button isn't showing, use the 4-square menu to get it).
4. Paste the thing.
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...
Unfortunately I stopped using it in favor of OpenBoard[3] due to subpar autocorrect, especially when typing in French[4].
[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkey...
[2]: screenshot from f-droid: https://f-droid.org/repo/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard/e...
[3]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmet...
[4]: https://github.com/AnySoftKeyboard/AnySoftKeyboard/issues/10...
I really miss Swiftkey :(
- copy the URL to clipboard
- open "Fast Notepad" app, paste
- edit, copy, paste
I agree, URL editing is infuriating especially with long URLs with massive tracking query strings (e.g. anything opened from Facebook). But not only. Sometimes I want to change subdomain of a long URL (e.g. from reddit to old.reddit) and it requires a lot of scrolling to the left.
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.
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?
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.
It is in this sense that I worry about the test scenario described being unrealistic. If one is measuring (and so implicitly optimising for) things that don’t matter, one is potentially rejecting solutions that would improve things that do matter without helping things that don’t.
More realistic scenarios could be:
- successfully format 10 lines or so of haskell into a hacker news comment. Obviously this is not relevant to most people but I give it as a more realistic scenario where typical mobile text-input mechanisms struggle.
- edit a misspelled name in an email of a few paragraphs.
- reorder two paragraphs in an email then edit for clarity.
- add full stops to a bulleted list (struggling with this right now).
I am sad that text editing on mobile is hard. But it does seem that efforts to make it better were not appreciated. My reading of the 3d-touch thing and other comments on this article is that the problem was appreciated by Apple but people didn’t particularly care[1] when Apple then dropped 3d-touch, for which improved text editing was its ‘killer app’.
[1] I have seen people complain about the loss of this online but I think the complaint is quite niche.
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.
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://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)
Putting cellphones on big standalone monitors might work. But in that case, we’ll probably also need to attach a pointing device and some way of entering text, so from a UI point of view, we’ve got a desktop.
Cellphones definitely have sufficient processing power for lots of typical office workloads nowadays… but using them in this way doesn’t seem to have caught on.
I dunno, eventually this sort of discussion ends up at “why didn’t DeX take over the world,” a question for which I have no good answers, since, like everyone else, I never tried it out.
I wonder if ultimately, the advantages of a "stay on the home row" philosophy like vim has just don't really manifest when there's no longer a physical keyboard as the underlying HMI. But the core idea of doing something modal and separating movement/selection from input does still feel valuable.
Not in the same way as vim, but you could hit a hot key to switch your keyboard to a navigation/select/copy+paste mode.
Since all the keys disappear, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select text or paste in a specific spot in that “mode”.
Right now it’s so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.
It's even officially documented as well [1]. I wonder if selection was introduced when the spacebar cursor was, or if it was later.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscree...
Actually, it wasn’t even a “space bar cursor”, as the way of triggering it was with force pressing and not by holding the space bar. It works much better with 3D Touch, as you can move the cursor around and press harder without lifting to start selecting, then release a bit to stop. My iPhone 8 can still do it, and I’m really going to miss it when I upgrade.
Since often on mobile devices I am responding to comment threads (in slack or gitlab or Jira, or indeed right now on HN, for example) the challenges I have in copy-pasting are often in grabbing text from a prior comment to quote, rather than in selecting my own text.
Doesn't appear to work.
What does work is pushing a little harder (i.e. "force touch") with the same finger/thumb that initiated the move-cursor-via-spacebar gesture.
Only problem there is that sometimes the forcetouch doesn't register (no matter how hard you pinch the screen), or is too trigger happy and starts selecting text when you only wanted to move the cursor.
EDIT: Oh, I need to use a second finger. Cool.
Adding one more modal keyboard page for cursor-editing (arrow keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, home/end, pgup/godown, select-toggle-button, delete, rclick menu) would just make sense. Would just be getting the rest of the desktop keyboard into the phone keyboard, nothing groundbreaking.
[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/gboard-v6-2-adds-cursor-contr... (2017)
Thank you for sharing, I could never have found it before knowing it exists.
Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it is fine IMO. The screen is a little bit small. Sometimes if I’m going to SSH from my phone, I’ll put the phone on a little stand in front of the keyboard, so it can sit more like a foot from my face, or whatever (normal cellphone usage distance). Or, I’ll put it in portrait mode farther away and think of it as “half a screen.”
Either way works fine for short stints. Nebulous concerns about eyeball heath for long sessions, although I have no real evidence to back that up, and we’re all screwed on that front anyway, right?
What GP is advocating is to replace the on-screen keyboard with a modal editing UX.
In the end I got Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard, I like the scissor actuation or whatever, but it is slightly too big to be as portable as a cellphone.
https://nuphy.com/collections/keyboards/products/air60?varia...
I can even hit Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, etc. This alone will help text editing on my phone.
That said, I am going to go try the unexpected keyboard.
I like it.
I really like the select cursor motion on the space bar. Makes quick work of a copy paste operation.
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
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-Proc...
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
But I always wonder why noone has tried building a hardware chord keyboard for a phone. It seems perfectly suited.
If you want to se PARTICULARLY bad examples, check out the social in-game example of harry potter magic awakened.
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
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.
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.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-do-i-enable-di...
Edit: fixed link
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Before: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move cursor, I press slightly harder.
Now: I'm typing quickly, and I want to move the cursor, I press and wait.
iOS17 has a "faster" haptic touch setting and it helps, but with 3d touch I was much faster.
Also, iOS has kept a software implementation of force touch around, even after removing the hardware: a hard press goes directly into cursor placement, it takes a bit more force than it used to. I imagine it’s a mix of gyroscopes and detecting a growing touch surface.
It’s restricted to the space bar, too. IIRC it was much better on my old 6S.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a lot of other shortcuts, too (cut, copy, paste, select all, home/end, etc).
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.
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.
copy and paste should be dedicated soft buttons, at least as long presses.
It would be nice if there was a simple and universal way to do this interaction more precisely!