Select and copy just a part of message DC iOS & Android

Feature Proposal
1

Right now is only posible to copy all text of message received but sometimes you just need to copy or select a portion.

For example here there is no way to select a part of text.

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2

This could be a good suggestion for Android too!!

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3

not sure if this is really needed or worth the effort. if you do a copy+paste, typically the paste-target is some text-field where you can remove portions of the text that are not needed.

on desktop, where you have typically finer selection tools, however, it is possible directly

4

When you have a short text it is not so important but sometimes the message is large and believe me it’s hard just remove the portion you aren’t needing.

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5

Selection stuff is always kinda hard on mobile IMO

6

I am honest, I don’t know no mail app who doesn’t able to select a portion of text. I think to prepare DC to do this is worthy.

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7

on the other hand: i’ve tested several messengers on android and ios: none of them are able to select a portion of a text :slight_smile:

not saying, they do everything right, though :wink:

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8

Good point! But remember the app not only works like a messenger, sending and receiving only from DC users. Sometimes just few contacts are using the app and some of them use to send large text.

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9

AFAIK for desktop-client it works. But there I have a mouse.

Select a part of text with my fingers is always dalliance.
I don’t need very often only a part of text copied. If I need it, I copy the whole text and delete the not needed part by using the backspace button.

So more important would be contextual reply.

https://support.delta.chat/t/reply-to-message/283

This is the most case where I use copy and paste.

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10

:smile:

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11

Maybe we can just have an option, select part of this message that opens a fullscreen text field of the message where you can select and copy stuff out, that would be a quick way to implement it.

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12

i also thought about a select-in-new-window+copy mode at some point, but i did not like that. it solves some problems with some corner cases but raises the overall number of options and complexity, things to maintain etc. also, these corner cases can be solved in another way (by deleting the portions that are not needed, see above), so i discarded the select-in-new-window+copy idea.

also, depending on the os, the virtual keyboard may help selecting things, eg. long-press on space or cursor keys or whatever. and this keyboard is available naturally only on pasting.

13

I don’t know the rust languaje but I wonder if there is no way to give the textbox some permission like lecture mode to able just copy a part of text and the user would decide if reply or whatever he wants.

:wink:

14

good point, why don’t you just make the bubble text selectable and users can select as they do with everything else

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15

Rust is only for the core, copy paste and selection is responsibility of the ui.

not sure if this is possible without completely implementing it.

16

I don’t know how this is implemented in DC/Signal but seems pretty simple:

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17

and on iOS?

18

Don’t have any idea, I don’t know anything about iOS even have seen such devices like once or two times in my life :smiley:

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19

but maybe replacing “TextView” with whatever is equivalent on iOS and do a web search will return something useful

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20

we’re not using just TextView on android, so this is probably a bit more complicated. i do not think it is really worth the effort. maybe we can rethink this when everything else is implemented :wink: