Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
The vast difference in editing things on a MicroPC with its touchpad and physical keyboard versus a phone is <i>immense</i>. I&#x27;m pretty sure I can legitimately type faster and usually navigate UIs faster on a capacitive touch phone, but the frustration of typing and targeting the cursor is unbelievable even after having used smartphones for over a decade now. It&#x27;s just bad.<p>It is amusing that it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;good enough&quot; for making small edits to fix typos or change the wording, which makes it feel like a non-issue.<p>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&#x27;t have much harder of a time doing it. And I think that speaks volumes on its own.