First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a pain. I can do it if I’m away from a computer and have to, but I don’t enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of concentration.

As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it.

I do think text editing could always be better and I actually think it’s a pretty broad use case. I’m also not convinced mobile is easily adapted to it, especially without really good text input [probably speech] which also isn’t suitable in a lot of situations.

I mean yes, of course, but how could it be otherwise? A desktop keyboard is 10x the size of an entire mobile phone. The idea that it should somehow be possible to attain the typing performance provided by such a large dedicated input device on a phone the size of a keyboard's space bar is pretty ridiculous.

And I'm unconvinced that the "Eloquent" design presented in the article is a step forward. The "T-Menu" looks terrible and confusing, and I find the drag animations quite jarring.

The only obvious, intuitive mobile interface for text entry is speech-to-text. I know it isn't quite there yet, but that doesn't mean fiddling with details of how cursor movement works on a phone screen has any realistic chance of ever solving the problem.

For writing prose, gboard is bad, but it's the least bad solution, its sliding gestures and predictions are good enough.

I use unexpected keyboard for programming on the go. Free and open source, originally developed for termux. It has arrow keys and modifiers, and undo also works (ctrl z). TBH it's not perfect for me as it doesn't have predictive text and its arrow keys are fiddly, so I use it sparingly.

It is amusing that it's hard to convince people this is a problem, but I sort-of understand. Over time people have learned to just, not edit text on mobile. There's relatively powerful versions of office suites on modern mobile OSes, certainly more powerful than Windows CE devices that had full keyboards would ever ship with, and yet most people don't even really consider doing much on mobile other than sending messages and taking notes, two things that rarely require dragging the cursor. When editing things you quickly type out, gestures like dragging the spacebar to move the cursor around is usually "good enough" for making small edits to fix typos or change the wording, which makes it feel like a non-issue.

On Pinephone with Squeekboard, I greatly miss the ability to drag on the spacebar to move text, and even slightly miss the ability to swipe across keys to type. And yet, the weird thing is, even though text editing on Phosh is significantly less refined than either Android or iOS... I ultimately don't have much harder of a time doing it. And I think that speaks volumes on its own.

There's lots of web pages where it's impossible to select text (sometimes turning off JS helps) on the iPad but the phone does it fine.

In some HTML text boxes it's just impossible to edit anything.

Selecting characters within a word is painful, it's far easier on the phone as it has an optical cursor - later Android phones have dropped this so I wonder if they're painful too.

I just spent 2 minutes trying to edit a url I mistyped in my iPhones url bar… I’m probably the stupid one , but how much time are we collectively forced to waste due to UI design that some humans thought was good for everyone but don’t function for everyone or maybe even most of the people or maybe even anyone but the QA people?

Trying to edit a single letter in the middle of a word? Do they have a course for this? Maybe some post-doc work?

I have three broken Android phones here attesting to it being a biplatform issue. I can’t imagine trying to use a virtual terminal on this gadget without taking servers down or wiping the root partition by accident…

I refuse to accept age related excuses as I’ll contend that it’s empirically difficult to edit text in a mobile browser url bar given a phones keyboard. Am I the only one?

I can move the cursor by pressing and holding the spacebar or 3D touching anywhere on the keyboard. I can then 3D touch harder in the same movement to select a word and drag to select more. One tap on that selecting brings up the menu. Double tapping selects a word, double tap and drag lets you select more. Here the menu appears instantly.

And the proficient users can even three finger pinch to copy and three finger zoom to paste. Or three finger tap to get a special menu.

——

This one might be specific to me but I can type on mobile nearly as fast as I can on my keyboard (I might just be a slow typer). I also sometimes feel like I’m the only one who highly appreciates autocorrect. It rarely makes mistakes (great, now I get roasted for every typo).

Still, editing on the computer is much better. I use a lot of shortcuts and vi modes where I can. But I don’t think this can be emulated on mobile. Please prove me wrong.

In place of touch, I'd prefer a new keyboard screen containing a joystick to move the text cursor with. On the opposite side of the keyboard, you could have all the context buttons, together with a 'select' button which can be held while moving the joystick to make a selection. Add a toggle button to the existing keyboard to switch from and to these new input options and you're all set.

Whether this solution is intuitive enough for the average mobile user is up for discussion.

The solution presented here is half-great, IMO. I really love the persistant cursor and dragging anywhere jumps the cursor to there. And the magnifier is great here too.

But I'm not crazy about "pressing harder" to do anything. Apple's 3D Touch never worked too well for me, despite the fact that I usually like Apple's UI and UX, and I'd be willing to bet Apple's implementation was the best implementation of that so far. Maybe this is something that I'd get used to if using?

I'm also not crazy about the proposed menu. It seems like it would be kind of confusing to me, like the way inverted-mouse (or joystick) feels right in some games and wrong in others. Or similarly, how inverted scrollwheel scrolling might feel right to someone used to touchpad scrolling but wrong to someone not used to touchpads. Again, though, maybe after trying it out it would actually work OK. It's kind of hard to say, but I'm skeptical.

Regardless, I'm really glad there's at least someone trying to rethink and improve text editing on mobile. I wonder if anyone can come up with enough of an improvement that Google or Apple would change how it is on their phones? Or is it too late, and they're going to stick with what we have forever because too many people are already used to it?

The problems are with editing only -- precise cursor positioning, precise selection, and then access to basic cut/copy/paste/undo operations that doesn't mess everything up.

My hunch is that we need a button on mobile keyboards to switch to a kind of "edit gesture mode". Some kind of swipe area to move the cursor, some kind of swipe area/mode to extend/contract a selection, some method to handle scrolling as necessary, some kind of magnifying zoom to select tiny things like narrow punctuation, and separate larger button areas for cut/copy/paste/undo. Maybe instead of swipes there are gestures in a kind of dedicated trackpad-type area of the screen, I don't know.

But I definitely think there's a ton of area for experimentation that hasn't been explored yet. The hold-spacebar-to-turn-keyboard-into-trackpad-to-move-cursor mode was a first step the iPhone took towards this, but I think it can go 20x further.

I think it's something that only Apple and Google are capable of developing right now though. I don't think there are enough API's exposed for third-party keyboards to directly control things like text selection, zoom, scrolling, cut/copy/paste/undo, and the like.

The weirder part to me was that the iPad didn't bring much improvement on that front. Even with a bigger screen and "desktop class" application, text editing only barely works with a keyboard/touchpad attached. The only improvement has been on moving the text cursor, yet it's still a real pain to select random text in the middle of a page.

On the solution though .... I think we should really do something simpler than introduce new paradigms and further dig the "that's how we do it on mobile" well.

Just give people damn arrow keys and a crontrol key: let them put a cursor on the middle of the text they want, move the cursor with ultimate precision exactly where they want it, and shift select the text they need.

Android does the arrow part right, Windows' on screen keyboard does both right. It's incredible how liberating it is to just select text with the arrow keys, hit ctrl+C, crl+V it elsewhere and be done. That's really not that much to ask, Apple not doing anything in this front feels like sheer laziness at this point.