Reply here if you have a comment about how to Improve copying and pasting!
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Reply here if you have a comment about how to Improve copying and pasting!
It's also okay to start a new topic on this page. Just go to the top of the main page and find the box that says "Start a new topic".
I think there is a problem in the application; where I can not copy and paste the text in the app, contrary to what is located in the site!
On mobile, it'd be great to find ways that the interface can provide copy/paste functionality, without the user having to actually perform the traditional copy and paste actions. Because, even something as simple as selecting a block of text to cut or copy can be a serious chore in a mobile editor.
In short, it's a nightmare. And for Wiki editing, specifically, we should be able to leverage the text parser to do better, by making more intelligent assumptions — at least some of the time.
Ditto for sentences, or paragraphs, perhaps — this would be a good opportunity for user research, to figure out what "unit" of text users most often copy-and-paste.
Mobile input systems have mostly settled on the single word as the default unit of selection — text-highlighting mode initiates when you long-press on a word, which gets selected, and then you can resize the selection area from there. But, I've never met anyone who bothers using copy-and-paste for a single word — they'll just retype it, because copying text is a big enough pain in the ass that it's not worth the trouble. When we use copy-and-paste, especially on mobile, it's because we want to sling around much more substantial blocks of text.
I know that, when I use copy/paste during my (dekstop) wiki editing, it almost always takes one of a few basic forms:
{{cite}}
transclusion inside the <ref>...</ref>
s), again either because I need to use it as a template, or because I need to duplicate it in a different article.All of these things typically involve click-and-drag (or hold-Shift-and-move-cursor) text highlighting operations, to perform on the desktop... and with a traditional keyboard/mouse input interface, they're fine! But on mobile, we should strive to eliminate manual text selection as much as possible, wherever possible. Because it is bad enough, and disruptive enough to the editing process, that doing it should be considered an absolute last resort.