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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Selection stuff is always kinda hard on mobile IMO
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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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 
not saying, they do everything right, though 
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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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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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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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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.
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.
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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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.
I don’t know how this is implemented in DC/Signal but seems pretty simple:
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and on iOS?
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 
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but maybe replacing “TextView” with whatever is equivalent on iOS and do a web search will return something useful
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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
to be honest, I don’t need this, I just copy+paste the text as you suggested even if it is a long email, then I just select the short part I need copy it and select all and delete,
also I don’t see this fine control quoting in apps like Telegram, just a simple reply option is good enough IMHO
@r10s a place I think need this text selection, is the “info” dialog, since Delta Chat hide some text on the original email making it inaccesible, only visible in this dialog but no way to copy it, and the dialog seems pretty simple so I think you will not complain to allow this selection stuff there??
I think this could be done relatively easily there and it’s not disturbing there (contrary to the chat view imo). Anyways I wonder if this will be ever used