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Comment by fisian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!)

Which is to say you can't as several of those actions are impossible for humans to do with enough accuracy.

Holding the spacebar makes moving to the correct location possible. Not easy, but possible.

Edit: Ah, but then the teardrop goes away.

So I guess not really a solution. Sorry.

Thank you for teaching me this! Not very discoverable!

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.

Wow.. TIL you can tap the tear drop, thanks!

Lol, same here, I've been using Android since 2011 and had no idea it was trappable

all these years ive been typing in a letter A where i want to paste something, then double tapping the A to highlight it and then selecting paste :/

It's actually gotten better since the clipboard key is in autocomplete bar in gboard now.

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.

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.

On android you need a bit better keyboard that has 'paste' as part of the keyboard. It does paste at the caret position

The hacker keyboard and unexpected keyboards both offer ctrl-[acvx]

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].

[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'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 really miss Swiftkey :(

You can long-press spacebar on iOS to get a trackpad-like behavior. And you can tap somewhere else to even select like that. Awkward, but it works.

Came here to say the same: editing a URL is very painful. I wish I could use a multiline editor for the URL.

My URL editing routine on Android:

- 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.

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