Can't text-select tags on mobile

Steps to reproduce

  1. Press hold over a tag
  2. Context-menu pops up which prevent text selecting a tag for editing

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

Y

Expected result

Text-selecting a tag

Actual result

Context menu unnecessarily popping up

Environment

SYSTEM INFO:
	Operating system: android 7.1.2 (Meizu M6 Note)
	Obsidian version: 1.5.8 (126)
	API version: v1.5.8
	Login status: not logged in
	Live preview: off
	Base theme: dark
	Community theme: none
	Snippets enabled: 0
	Restricted mode: on

there is no tag editing, neither in desktop nor on mobile

Your assumption is incorrect. I don’t want “tag management” features. I want to for tags to be represented and editable as plain text in a note when I edit it. New editor seems to prevent this. I cannot select tags in the body of a note as simple text, they are always represented as a special entity even in the source mode. The automatic context pop-up is preventing text selecting the tags. Older Obsidian versions did not have this issue.

Please move this back to Bugs. Or at least tell me if it’s possible to disable automatic context menu pop-up on the mobile when text-selecting certain things. If the context menu can be only triggered manually this can solve the issue.

For the note, nothing is automatically triggered when text selecting tags in source mode editing on Desktop.

Ok, I will double check.

I see this on iOS, too, but not iPadOS. (I’ve never noticed before because somehow I never thought to select tags this way.) On iOS the context menu is a full-width thing that covers much of the screen, including the selected text. On iPad it’s a more desktop-like popup and you can see and manipulate the selection.

1 Like

Possible workaround

In various contexts on Android I find I can’t click/push (and hold) on some objects to select them, as that would trigger some other mechanism. What I do as a workaround, which usually works, is to push (and hold) on something next to what I really want, and then use the handles to re-select what I really wanted.

In other words; you could select the next word, drag handle to include the tag, and drag the other handle to unselect the first word. Kind of clumsy but it works…

1 Like

I know about this workaround and used it before. But alas it doesn’t work this time. If a text selection handle ends up anywhere over a tag (start and end also counts) the dreaded context-menu pops up while canceling the text selection.

Actually, I’ve tested more now and clickable links show the same exact behavior as tags in this case. You can’t text-select them on mobile for faster editing too.

This is not a mobile specific issue. There should be an “edit tag” option in the context menu like there is for wikilinks.

The other way is to click/tab right after the tag (or wikilink)

This is mobile-specific since on desktop you can still place the cursor via arrowkeys. In iOS the expectation is that the context menu won’t appear if the softkeyboard is visible.

That is a good option to have. Still, behaving appropriately when being text selected (in source editing) on mobile is still a necessary for comfortable editing IMO. I sometimes need to text-select a bunch of links, tags to quickly delete/cut/copy/paste them.

This doesn’t happen for me (on iOS). “Select a neighbor and move the selection” is how I’ve been selecting tags for quite some time. It never occurred to me to try long-pressing a tag until I saw this thread.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

this is fixed in 1.6.1