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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Press F6 in firefox for caret browsing.

That would be F7. The same works in Chrome.

Ah I didn’t realise it still existed. I think I must have misremembered the warning as being a deprecation notice.

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.

One cool thing about the Samsung s-pen is it can select any text on the screen (drag while holding the pen button)

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