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Comment by asadm | Hacker News Reader

I hate it that I cannot select a substring from a chat bubble these days in any of the chat apps. I just get an option to copy all of it.

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Apps like Instagram/Pintrest have just made the user feel blunt when they can't even select a snippet of text in the app, following hyperlinks in a comment...or even download media by right-clicking on the web-browser

To be fair this is not a new problem. Windows still doesn't let you select text at all in certain GUI contexts. Especially annoying when you need to copy an error message.

most error messages you can just click on the error window and press ctrl+c and then paste to your favorite text editor.

this works nearly everywhere in W10- that uses native code to display the error, I can't vouch for how well this works in W11 where they butchered everything

Sure for native GUIs yes, but this was already something browsers supported & these apps just steam-rolled their 'keep 'em hooked & on platform' plan....I just lose patience when there's no slider on most doom-scroll apps either. Like c'mon....thankfully reddit still has it

Staying consistent with their brilliant UX and smart design choices, I like Telegram's approach/solution to chat bubble selection. The first long-press selects the entire bubble, bringing up message-specific options, and second long-press on the substring initiates finer text selection.

https://telegram.org/blog/scheduled-reminders-themes#redesig...

This is a problem to a degree even in Messages.app.

If a message consists of only a phone number for example, it's very hard to hit the pixel you need to long-press to copy it, otherwise all you get is phone number context like whether you want to call the number, create a contact, or add to a contact.

If you manage to hit the frame of the bubble you can get the context menu for copying all of it, but that's often quite hard in my experience.

It is so annoying! Slack in particular. I screenshot and then copy. Feels like a waste of compute as well as a hassle.

screenshot the page, and then you can use the iOS text extraction to select a substring :) (serious!)

Facebook is also really spectacular crappy to use on mobile safari in this regard.

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