I’d say that handling text is still the weakest point in iOS. 3D-touch on the phone and the 2-finger gesture on iPad have made it easier to select text, but this is only available on editable text. When you want to select from a webpage e. g. you still have to work with those tiny handles and often it just jumps around etc.
Then you have to wait for the pop-up and sometimes it just doesn’t show up or you accidentally don’t tap it correctly and the whole selection gets lost again.
And when you want to paste, you have to tap the blank space first and wait for the pop-up and sometimes it just doesn’t show up and this is all a nuisance.
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Yup. Absolutely. This is a major reason why I can’t see using the iPad as my primary computer.
Or you highlight text on Discourse and the ‘Cut | Copy | Paste |…’ thing pops up over the editor buttons for link, quote, etc. and sometimes you can tap off and it will leave the text highlighted, and sometimes not.
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I agree. Using a keyboard with the iPad does help quite a bit but it still is a weak spot and particularly poor with just fingers on the iPhone.
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Yes, the external keyboard is a huge help. But again, only with editable text. Also, I‘m using my phone more and more (especially since I got the Max). Sometimes actually also with an external keyboard, but mostly of course with the display.
It’s annoying enough that text selection is so fiddly, but I don’t get why it even has to be buggy. Yesterday I had this situation again where the pop-up just wouldn’t appear, even though my selection was there. I finally got it by tapping on the none-selected text, getting „all“, then copying everything and deleting what I didn’t need in the target app.
Yesterday I was in a situation where I wanted to select a precise block of text and when I lifted my finger the cursor would move three or four characters. I tried four or five times and then just gave up and selected a block longer than I wanted and trimmed it in Drafts. This kind of thing happens several times a day with me and it’s possibly the main reason I could never use an iOS device as my primary computer.
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I used to have a text editor called „Textkraft“ that had a great extra keyboard row with clever buttons to select text by character, word etc. Maybe something like this could be a solution.
I end up using my Apple Pencil to help make some text selection easier, but you’re right it’s still less than ideal.
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