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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

> We saw this in our user testing when users tried to place the text cursor accurately: they would miss by a few characters...

One small thing: I don't know how it works on Android, but I used to have an N9 and then the Jolla phone and you could tap anywhere in text to place the cursor there.

iOS doesn't let you, except confusingly on the very first tap that activates the cursor. For subsequent taps, you can tap exactly where you want in the middle of a word and it always snaps the cursor to the start or end of that word.

I'm pretty good at aiming at the right character to edit even with big fingers on a small screen. Let me do it!

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Hold down the space bar and you can move the cursor wherever you want, also on Android. I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.

I know about it, but that's a second action (moving it after tapping), or a more difficult one (moving it all the way there via the spacebar touchpad). Most of the time if a tap would put the cursor where I tapped, it'd already be there.

Edit: I just discovered now that if you long-press on the text to place the cursor, you get a little magnified view and it does let you place the cursor in the middle of a word. So that's probably the most efficient method currently available.

> Edit: I just discovered now that if you long-press on the text to place the cursor, you get a little magnified view and it does let you place the cursor in the middle of a word. So that's probably the most efficient method currently available.

I chuckled a little at this as this is one of the oldest features of iOS, probably even from back in the pre-iPhone 4 days.

In my defence apparently it was removed in iOS 13 and only recently came back.

It was still there but it required a force click anywhere on the keyboard.

It's just another example of how mobile UIs are bad due to their form factor: they lack discoverability.

> I chuckled a little at this as this is one of the oldest features of iOS

Reminiscent of how I feel whenever I copy and paste something on Android

> probably even from back in the pre-iPhone 4 days.

The first iPhone I got was a 3GS and it had the feature. The person at the apple store helpfully demonstrated it to me when I went to pick it up.

People don't know about it because it's not discoverable.

I knew it, but I had to be told, and it's not too intuitive

How would they? Apple loves to put useful features that are completely hidden unless you know the secret incantation to activate them.

> I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.

I have an iPad without that feature, and it's maybe 5 years old? I think it's a newer feature.

Also, in the past you could tap and hold on text and it would magnify the view around where you were tapping, but that feature was dropped at some point.

> Also, in the past you could tap and hold on text and it would magnify the view around where you were tapping, but that feature was dropped at some point.

This is back in iOS/iPadOS 15.

It's been on the iPhone since before it was even called "iOS" and it's there today. It never went away, so I wonder what you are talking about.

Hmmm ... nonsense apparently!

I got my iPad, tried several different apps, and I now see that the feature is present in all of the ones I tried.

I think what I did differently this time was hold the spacebar down long enough for the feature to kick in. On my android phone there isn't that long of a delay, so I think that's what threw me off.

Thank you for the correction!

On Android it often stutters, the cursor jumps across the characters at random speeds, sometimes it teleports sometimes it moves one character at a time smoothly. When you lift your thumb it often registers as an extra motion in an unexpected direction. And this is on a flagship Google phone. And it only allows left-right motion, not up-down.

So even if you know about it. It's more an exercise in frustration than anything.

That's not been my experience on Android, I can go left right up down just fine. I've tried this on SwiftKey keyboard however but I'm sure it's the same in GBoard.

I am using the Google keyboard, android 13, and I cannot go vertical only horizontal.

It's really bad in GBoard. I just tap the text itself and if I get close enough to what I want to edit I just backspace and retype. I regularly remove 5-10 characters just to fix a single mistyped one.

I do the same. It's really bad. US English version.

I do have long press on space bar to switch between EN/FR dictionary. I wonder if that makes things worse.

On my budget Samsung Android it works great.

It's not "on Android", it's whichever keyboard came with your phone. On iOS extremely small number of people use non-standard keyboard(it was later allowed), but on Android the keyboard was always an app and there are many.

It's the Google keyboard on a Google phone. Out of the box experience.

The Google keyboard on a Google phone for some locales can be very different. Notably, the keyboard for Japanese doesn't do the spacebar thing, on the other hand, it contains actual keys to move left and right.

How is anyone supposed to discover that?

At least for SwiftKey, it's one of the settings you can enable/disable.

How am I only discovering this now..

Holding down the space bar on my (Google) keyboard brings up a popup to change the keyboard. Sliding my finger along the space bar shifts the cursor.

I miss my very first Android phone (the original HTC Desire) which had a tiny hole they called an "optical trackball" that worked incredibly well for selecting text.

Ah, that makes me think of the PlayStation Vita and its back-side touchpad. This could be a nice addition to smartphones. The only (substantial!) challenge is to make it usable while holding it.

> I'm surprised more people don't know about this feature.

If only apps and phones had a manual to describe the functionality available...

I know about this in Swiftkey, but since I'm using more than one language, this action is used to change languages instead. It's unfortunate because moving the cursor is very useful.

Swipe changes the language but a long press activates the cursor in Android

You know what was great about text selection on the N9? When you dragged the cursor, you got that haptic tick-tick-tick for each character the cursor passed over. I'll admit I don't entirely understand why this was so beneficial, but somehow it made it substantially easier to get the cursor to the right spot.

Yeah man, everything about the N9 merged hardware and software well. Like the curved glass and smooth edges going along with the edge swipe interaction.

I also used to move my cursor with high accuracy and I wish it was still an option.

There are 3 ways to position the cursor on iOS in normal input fields: 1. long tap 2. long tap on spacebar 3. move 2 fingers simultaneously on the iPad virtual keyboard (iPad only). For all the frustration i had with the iOS keyboard, it‘s actually quite good. Real problems are often created by 3d-Party JavaScript tools, a old version of codemirror for example.

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