[craighay1]

I sometimes wonder if modal editing (like vim uses) might be a good approach for navigating/editing longform text on touch devices.

It does seem like a missed opportunity to have taken the keyboard/mouse approach and then transferred it to touch devices. Even the keyboard layout has no real advantage for two thumb typing on a screen.

Approaches that adapt the interface whilst leaning heavily on letter based inference could be interesting for one handed / single digit entry of letters. Something like dasher: https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/dashersummary.html

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)

[lachlan_gray]

On an iPhone if you hold the space bar down the whole keyboard becomes a kind of trackpad which you can use to move the cursor.

Since all the keys disappear, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to add something that works like mouse buttons so you could select text or paste in a specific spot in that “mode”.

Right now it’s so frustrating to do any kind of selecting.

[failuser]

You can use that for selection as well, tap somewhere else on the keyboard. Used to be even better with 3D Touch, you did not have to wait for the long press to register.

[_Microft]

As the finger starts close to the bottom edge of the screen, I always struggle with moving the cursor downwards. Is there a trick for that?

[BagelGuy]

OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING HOW DID I NOW KNOW THIS

[miniupuchaty]

I've been using nvim in termux on foldable phone since I've bought phone in that form factor. It works great, I'm using "unexpected keyboard" as input method for faster special symbols access. It works pretty well. Good enough for me to program on the go.

[justin_oaks]

Thanks for letting me know about the Unexpected Keyboard app. It'll take some getting used to, but having arrow keys and punctuation available without changing modes is pretty awesome.

I can even hit Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, etc. This alone will help text editing on my phone.

[Pxtl]

In gboard we've already got modal stuff for numerical keypad, emojis, special characters (2 different modal pages), etc.

Adding one more modal keyboard page for cursor-editing (arrow keys, ctrl-arrow-keys, home/end, pgup/godown, select-toggle-button, delete, rclick menu) would just make sense. Would just be getting the rest of the desktop keyboard into the phone keyboard, nothing groundbreaking.

[somethingsidont]

This exists on Android Gboard, though it's hidden in some menus by default. [0]

[0] https://www.xda-developers.com/gboard-v6-2-adds-cursor-contr... (2017)

[thomastjeffery]

They already have an option to move your visit by dragging across spacebar. Why not just replace half of the oversized spacebar key with something useful?

[bee_rider]

You can install blink shell, panic prompt, or whatever the popular iPhone ssh client of the day is and ssh over to your desktop to get a preview of how this would work.

Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, it is fine IMO. The screen is a little bit small. Sometimes if I’m going to SSH from my phone, I’ll put the phone on a little stand in front of the keyboard, so it can sit more like a foot from my face, or whatever (normal cellphone usage distance). Or, I’ll put it in portrait mode farther away and think of it as “half a screen.”

Either way works fine for short stints. Nebulous concerns about eyeball heath for long sessions, although I have no real evidence to back that up, and we’re all screwed on that front anyway, right?

[thomastjeffery]

SSH isn't a solution. I'm trying to edit text here on my phone, not out on some server.

What GP is advocating is to replace the on-screen keyboard with a modal editing UX.

[soupbowl]

I do this all the time but I have not found a Bluetooth keyboard that is portable and not total junk. Do you have any suggestions?

[breakfastduck]

modal editing is just too much overhead for the average smart phone user.

[Shared404]

I dunno, Samsung's default keyboard already has am implementation of modal editing, which was loved by most of it's users that I knew.

Not in the same way as vim, but you could hit a hot key to switch your keyboard to a navigation/select/copy+paste mode.

[eviks]

That's fine, the average computer user also doesn't use modal editing

[genter]

There's tons of professional writers though, not to mention business users, lawyers, and other professionals that do lots of writing. It's pretty obvious that desktops are going the way of the dodo, and the aforementioned users need to write lots of text on mobile devices. I don't think modal text entry is any more onerous to learn than a graphic artist learning Blender or Photoshop, or an engineer learning Solidworks.

[dietr1ch]

I don't think so, but the mode change can't be some obscure thing slightly changing in the status bar.

[mikepurvis]

But nowadays you can install custom keyboards on every OS that could probably get you most of the way there.