If I do a long press in the browser on the text of your answer, I cant select anything. A menu pops up which me also does not select any item of its list. Just give it a shot on my text here in the browser.
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Itās tricky, and thereās a slight delay, too.
Maybe itās more of a drag across the words than a long-press.
And it works more smoothly in Terminal than in the text editor.
Edit: Yes, itās definitely a long drag, rather than a simple long press. Apologies.
Long press gets you this limited dialog (Select All, and Paste):
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In Web I can only select a single word by double-tapping, or the entire text by quadruple-tapping.
In Firefox, double-tapping a word adds the selection tools to each end of the word, which you can drag to the beginning and end of the text you want to copy (using the Menu options in Squeekboard, or the edit tools in the Firefox menu.).
IIUC this only works for content that your bash command can access, not for stuff thatās already shown in the terminal, right?
Trying to select in gedit today, I see lots of things happening at the same time when dragging across text:
- portions of the text are highlighted (blue background)
- little begin and end markers appear
- below the text a small magnifying class appears
If I succeed to select the text I wanted, tapping on the end marker brings the ccp menu, so that part actually looks good.
Two concerns, still:
First, it seems to require a lot of practice to get the desired results, e.g., most of the time I could select only entire words, but sometimes I succeeded to let the selection stop in the middle of a word. I couldnāt yet figure out which gesture drives which kind of selection. The selection seems to have its own will, also jumping in unexpected ways. Also the magnifying glass with its animation is quite distracting.
Second, as I donāt see this in other applications, I wonder if weāre at the mercy of developers of each and every application to implement select functionality? Isnāt there a fundamental approach built into wayland / the basic toolkits?
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Yeah, itās definitely quirky. Place your finger or stylus at the desired starting point, then drag to wherever desired. If it selects an entire word or phrase and you want to shorten the selected area, drag one of the end āmarkersā to the appropriate place. This is much easier with a stylus pen than with a finger.
Tap one of the markers to get cut/copy/paste.
Then tap the screen to de-select the selected text. Long-press elsewhere in the screen (or inside another app) to get the marker again, and touch it to get the Select All or Paste icon.
Hopefully youāve also discovered the āTerminalā keyboard option in Squeekboard, which includes a āMenuā button with all the select/copy/paste/delete functions. That should help when using all the other apps where copy/paste would be appropriate.
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I think so.