[nicwolff]

And they had it solved! 3D Touch worked perfectly – you pushed the screen hard to get a cursor, moved it to the start of the selection, and pushed hard again to drag to the end. They killed it because "not all iPhones had the hardware to support it" or something.

[thewebguyd]

3D touch was amazing I'm still upset they canned it.

[nehal3m]

You can still get a cursor by holding down space bar.

[lloeki]

Space bar which is at... the bottom of the screen, so if you want to move the caret down... 3D Touch worked _anywhere_, also had no delay, and hard press a second time was much more convenient for selection.

[112233]

that deserves a whole separate opera. why does moving the cursor to start/end almost always place it one character off? same when trying to use touch on text for it.

[crena]

This. I feel like this is due to small shifts when lifting the finger. For the life of me, I cannot get myself to lift it like the testers at Apple do, and so I wished the product itself could go through learning phase; studying intentions and what actual touches happen.

[Pulcinella]

Apple devs are probably doing something with the touch returned by the touchUpInside callback. This is an extremely, extremely common bug in iOS apps, not just with Apple developed software.

Devs love the symmetry of their touch handling code and often have the finger-down, finger-moved, and finger-up callbacks from the system all call the same handleTouch function they wrote. As you can tell, however, the touch from the finger up callback is often better discarded or handled differently otherwise you get these sort of bugs

[ulbu]

you can still make selections using the keyboard without 3d touch.

[gloxkiqcza]

How? I know you can move the cursor by holding space and dragging but how do you start the selection?

[ulbu]

touch the keyboard area with another finger :)

[nmlt]

Thanks for that tip!

Unfortunately, it's still bad. It's a bit better than dragging the handles of the selected area, but if I go to far and want to reduce the selected area, it doesn't work anymore.

[ulbu]

yes, this feature seems to be extend-only.

[hulitu]

I have an Apple hand, with only one finger.

[The_President]

I found the Apple Table Saw user!

[talkin]

“Intuitive!”

[epaga]

I do it by double-tapping a word and then dragging the handles… does that work for you?

[brigandish]

> iOS Text Selection is Pure Chaos

> You just wanted to move the cursor. Now everything is selected.

> You want to position the cursor at the end of a line. You tap. It selects the last word. You try to grab the handle — it doesn't respond and deselects. You tap again, now it selects the whole sentence. You tap blank space to deselect — nothing. You tap five more times. On the fifth, it selects all. You switch apps hoping the selection disappears. You tap and hold — sometimes text selects, sometimes a menu appears, sometimes nothing. Got a Magic Keyboard? Good luck — trackpad selection just doesn't work half the time, but touching the screen does. Eventually you select all, delete everything, and retype from scratch. Apple has had 17 years to figure out touch text selection. This is where they landed.