Microblog Memes

The reddit mobile app has broken text selection. I did same thing as OP but with my stylus.

Like when someone makes an image of text? At least OP set alt text & linked to the source with real text: rare at lemmy.

Or when you try and select a letter and it auto selects the whole fucking work or sentence, jumping all over the place?

UI user here.

A good rule of thumb for interfaces is "one action, one function." Highlighting text and opening a context menu are two separate functions that should require separate actions (at least as default behavior, user configurability is also a good thing). If I highlight text, the only thing that should indicate is that I want the text highlighted. If I subsequently want a context menu, I will do the context menu action (right click, long press, etc). A UI should never be trying to predict what I want and it absolutely should not be doing things that I didn't explicitly direct.

You need sane defaults and having what is effectively a predefined macro is not a sane default.

(Apologies for my tone below, but this affects me also, and I dislike the notion that messing with how you normally select text is a niche desire)

We don't need any new functionality or a custom mode, we just want unexpected popups to not get in the way of expected behaviour when selecting text.

As long as your options appear well above the text, and doesn't cancel the highlighting, I can't accept whatever you want to do. But as the OP writes, if it's easy to misclick, this is bad UI design because it does not conform to the expectation that nothing will pop up. (Google Docs is the first example that comes to mind as implementing popup options totally fine, from recollection)

If it's too close to the selected text and causes misclicks, then I'm gonna be annoyed about this since the vast, vast majority (luckily) of text on the internet you can highlight to your heart's content and nothing pops up.

Just keep options decently above the highlighted text (I dunno what the right number is, 2 lines above the start of your selection? hey I'm not a UI designer)

In conclusion, change is okay, but intuition is important.

Tantacrul makes some great UI videos if you haven't seen them before (not that I'm telling you how to suck eggs about your own profession, he's just genuinely funny and interesting to watch)

I disagree.

The mode for options is called the right mouse button and the mode for just highlighting is the left mouse button. One of the great pillars of UI design is conforming to expectations.

lots of people do it, not just people with dyslexia. it helps keep track of where you are when there are large blocks of text. also it usually raises contrast so I'm sure that helps some people even more.

Do you want to copy text into a translator app? Fuck you!

honestly i really hate that. i managed to get rid of it auto copying selected text (don't remember how) but seriously how do i disable pasting with the mouse wheel, it's never what i want to do

that reminds me of how scrolling would edit settings in GUI menus. Made me so mad because I don't know what I accidentally changed but I changed something that's gonna send me on a wild goose chase in 2 weeks

The no capitalization makes it hard for me. I think just re-writing with capitalization makes it a lot easier to read:

Note to UI designers. When reading a long piece of text. I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it!. I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text I often select the text. I don't want to perform actions on the text. I don't want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.

Here's how I would mildly edit the punctuation in order to make it easier to read:

Note to UI designers; when reading a long piece of text, I select the text while I read it. I select the text while I read it! I select the text using my mouse. While I read the text, I often select the text. I don't want to perform actions on the text. I don't want to accidentally click share link. I want to select the text while I read it.

Here's how I would have conveyed the thought in a JIRA comment:

UI designers could you please, for the love of all mankind, stop fucking putting fucking shitty ass popups in the god damn non-mobile website! There is no one, and I mean no-fucking-body, that is still using a desktop computer in 2025 that does not know about ctrl-c and ctrl-v. There is not sane reason for you to ever assume a user wants to visit some shitty twitter/reddit/digg/blog when they select text on a desktop computer. If I see a single one of you motherfuckers putting fucking text inside an action I swear to god I will come down there and beat you to death with your own fucking keyboard.