Posting on Mastodon Scott Jenson suggested that text editing on the iPad is “tedious”. My initial reaction was, no, it’s not. I read through the thread and I think it speaks more to his lack of experience with the iPad. From his various posts it would seem he decided to jump into one of those “can the iPad be my computer stunts” and bumped into a variety of bugs and differences he didn’t like. Now, I can’t speak to the bugs as I’ve found the iPad with keyboard/trackpad to be rock solid for years.

I hopped over to his very in depth blog post. He makes some great points there in regards to touch-based editing of text but it seems to be oriented towards phone-based editing.

I’ve been coding and writing with a variety hardware keyboards and text editors on the iPad for years, have I just adapted to a poor experience? Is text editing that much better an a Mac? I don’t think so but I’ll get back to that comparison in a bit.

His primary point is that while typing initial text is fine, it’s the going back to edit text that is broken. He attributes this to the origins of text editing conventions established with desktop computing being adapted to touch screens.

Text editing on mobile isn’t ok. It’s actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem very few appreciate…

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.

My first thought on reading through his post is that it’s certainly true that text editing can be more difficult if one is only using touch. I think the experience is far better today than it was but it can be frustrating at times. But I would add that I think some of the frustration likely comes from a lack of practice. There’s a fine line between spending time and learning the features and process of touch-based text editing and spending time with a touch based device and adapting to a bad experience. That’s a nuance I’m not sure how to define.

While his post is focused on Android he makes it clear that he thinks the problem crosses over to iOS. He conducted a ten person experiment giving users simple text editing tasks like deleting a character or moving a word to the end of a sentence:

Every single person had problems with targeting, using the clipboard, and made lots and lots of errors…

They all expressed frustration, but not so much with messaging or social media apps, where they typically only needed to write short bursts of text. However, when it came to composing more complex text, such as multiple-sentence emails, they often said things like, “I’ll start it on my phone, but if it gets too complex, I’ll just finish it on my laptop.”

Well, I can certainly relate to that. But he’s mixing things up a bit here. Notice, he wrote “composing more complex text, such as multiple-sentence emails”. See, now he’s talking about both the typing of initial text and editing. For people used to computing with a hardware keyboard composing with a touch screen is very likely going to be a subpar, slower, more error prone experience. I dislike it and won’t do it at all. Anything more than a couple words and I go to dictation. But that’s composing from scratch and then also editing. Yuck.

The experience I have tapping with my fingers on my iPhone is NOT the experience I have on my iPad when it’s attached to keyboard.

In discussing text editing with a desktop/laptop he writes:

The combination of these three features—an accurate pointer, simple selection, and a menu with command keys—made text editing easy, relatively error-free, and unambiguous.

Fair enough and agreed! But much of the post is about editing text with touch. Now, up to 2020 I was using the iPad with an external keyboard and touch-based editing and had become very proficient. Was it as easy as a desktop with a pointing device? Perhaps not but the combination did work very well for me in part because I was starting with a hardware keyboard for input. And with practice I was quite good with touch-based selection, etc. It was not as accurate as a cursor but it generally worked for me in part because I used the touch-tap to move the cursor and then used the keyboard to select/copy/cut text. Then tap/touch again to paste, etc. Also, when one is proficient with a touch screen on an iPad, it’s second nature to quickly scroll with the fingers. Moving in a large text document can be very fast. The touch screen is a very nice trackpad!

He really doesn’t address text editing on the iPad with a trackpad or mouse for cursor support. In my time revisiting the Mac to compare to the iPad I didn’t find it easier on the Mac. Perhaps that’s because I’ve become familiar with any differences between the two. The iPad with an external keyboard/trackpad have been my daily experience for 4 years now. With one finger using the touch screen and the other on the keyboard/trackpad, the combination of inputs can be very powerful. In this way an iPad in the Magic Keyboard with a trackpad is, with practice, better than a laptop with just a trackpad.

That said, I would highlight one problem area: inconsistency in selecting text to move. Some apps allow for selection and then dragging the selection to a different spot in the document. Others don’t. Some seem to support it with touch based selection and moving but not with a trackpad cursor. Those that do support selecting and then moving with a trackpad or mouse can be very clumsy or inconsistent. In particular I noticed Textastic on the iPad does not allow for a long press to move selected text via drag and drop. It does work on Textastic on the Mac.

This may be a problem for some. It’s never been a problem for me because I don’t select text for movement via drag and drop. As I’ve got a keyboard attached I select text then use the keyboard shortcut to copy or cut and then paste. I had to go out of my way to discover that it didn’t work in Textastic.

I do think there is room for improvement with touch-based text entry and editing but this sort of post just gets messy trying to cover too much ground with too many variables. Different people with different experiences, needs, temperments, etc all influence expectations, willingness to learn and final outcomes. We have very powerful computers that come in radically different form factors that are suited to different tasks, users, and situations. Find the mix of devices that work best for you in whatever situations you tend to be in. Learn how to use them, be ready to learn more with new device form factors and OSs. Prepare to be frustrated at times, delighted at other times.