"Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates."

narwhal@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 211 points –
jenson.org
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Bloody hell yes. I have to select text on my phone all the time and that little hovering Android context menu is utterly atrocious. How that passed any UX process is completely beyond me.

  1. It hovers over text, rather than appearing in a predictable location like every other context menu in the OS does.
  2. The menu just doesn't appear sometimes. Usually when the selected text is large or near the edge of the screen or the screen is zoomed in.
  3. It's unstable. Every time you bring it up, the context sensitivity might add additional options. That context sensitivity is good, but it also means that one has to scan the menu for the desired option every single time, no matter how proficient one gets.
  4. It's uncustomisable. One of my most-used options requires me to select the text and wait for the menu, tap the three-dots to open the second layer of the tiny little context menu, scroll that tiny sub-list past a bunch of less-commonly used options to the option I use all the time, then tap on that. The menu is sorted arbitrarily, not even alphabetically, and is completely unmodifiable.
  5. And what is given sort-priority over my actually used context menu items? "Share". I can share text with two taps, which I will never do, but the action I use dozens of times a day requires three taps and a scroll to find it.

Gods have mercy on your soul if the selected text handle appeared near the screen edge and you need to adjust the selection. If you're using gesture navigation, 4 out of 5 times it will think you're trying to navigate away. Goodbye all the text!

This comment raised my blood pressure.

While I like the back gesture, it does interfere at the worst of times. Text selection and scrolling an ebook sideways for example.

And this is yet another reason why the whole reddit app thing has two clear sides, annoyed people and dumbasses. Several apps try to make text boxes slightly more manageable, some padding and whatnot. They store text even if the app crashes. Stuff like thata. And the official one doesn't.