Technology

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.

This post really shows how old I am, because I immediately thought "does anyone actually compose on a mobile device?" The experience is so bad I limit my own mobile compositions to message responses like "k" and "lol".

I wrote this comment on my phone and it was an awful experience 🙃. But hey, at least my keyboard app suggested a silly emoji...

I'll continue to do my "real" writing on my desktop for now. Integration apps like KDEConnect have been enough for me to get by, but they aren't perfect either.

But most importantly, fixing text editing isn’t seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS. It’s not the flashy feature that shifts your Net Promoter Scores.

This kind of stuff is exactly why I hate non-free hardware and software, it kills experimentation. It sucks so much that there are no good options for free mobile phones. And for this you wouldn't even have to free your software, you'd simply have to give the user the ability to tinker with their OS outside of the walled garden that is the app-store filled with these shitty cash- and data-grabby webapps.

I'd be interested in trying the system this guy is talking about. Anyone know if Eloquent is installable at this point?

I have tried it multiple times with various devices, going back to the Palm Pilot. Modern Android does the best of any environment I've tried, but I still consider it unusable for editing. There may be some clever, outside-of-the-box solution that would make it viable, but so far there hasn't been enough demand to drive that kind of development.

What REALLY irks me is that the gboard keyboard on Android is context-sensitive. No, I don't want to have a shortcut for ".com" when long-pressing the period key while typing an address, I want to type a fscking dash!

On Android, I've used Hacker's Keyboard since my earliest days on the platform and still use it to this day. It provides a full 5-row layout including modifiers, control keys, and arrows. It works exactly like you'd expect it to work. I can't stand the default keyboards.

On mobile Linux, there is a keyboard called squeekboard that lets you define the key layout using .yaml files. The default layout is pretty limited, but I created my own portrait and landscape 5-row layouts also with modifiers, control keys, and arrows that makes the experience so much better. I'm typing this on my custom portrait layout. I often edit code and use the terminal with this layout too. phone keyboards are bad because of bad design choices, not because touch keyboards are inherently bad.

I used to have a Blackberry Pearl which had a seemingly unique keyboard layout of two characters per key. It was the perfect compromise between the old school T9 and qwerty. That keyboard (with physical keys nonetheless) combined with that little trackball thing, it was easily the best handheld device I've used for text entry and editing. I know the article was focused on editing and not necessarily text entry but it really got me thinking. By doubling up and having two characters per key, it would open up a big chunk of real estate for things like cursor keys and other shortcuts.

I love typing and using keyboards in general. I love using Ctrl and Shift with the arrows, end & home, all of it. I would love to love doing it on my phone too.

This issue was solved by a 3rd party extension available on Cydia for Jailbroken iPhones a long time ago called SwipeSelection. Apple decided to copy the feature but implement it in a way (hold the space bar and scroll) that makes it usable thus useless. The time it takes to hold the spacebar to enable Apple's swipe thing makes it unpractical, the tweak was way better.