Wednesday, April 13, 2016

[zzjtixsx] Android Gmail on Droid 4 usable again

Sometime recently (version 6.3.117716127.release or before), Gmail for Android finally fixed a bug in which a phantom "control" keypress would happen unexpectedly in the message composition window, causing (for example) the pressing the letter A on the physical slide-out keyboard to Select All instead of typing the letter a.  This was disastrous because the next keystroke after "a" could delete the selected-all text and replace it with something else, losing everything you had typed.

This blog is mostly written in Gmail, though recently hasn't been due to this bug.

We still have lost keyboard shortcuts to cut/copy/paste, previously awkwardly accessible with the capacitative menu button and X C V.  (And originally highly convenient on the OG Droid which had a physical Menu button.)  The bug mentioned above appeared soon after this feature was removed.

Text selection with shift+arrow keys while in normal typing mode is a dead end; one cannot cut or copy the highlighted text, though one can (dangerously) replace it or delete it with backspace.  Instead one can enter text selection mode by double tapping or tap-hold, highlighting some bogus text under your fat fingers, then navigating to the actual text you want to manipulate with arrow keys and selecting with shift+arrow.  On screen buttons provide cut and copy to clipboard.

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