When the article says: "because for all the multitouch gestures Apple can add, there’s just no beating a good old mouse when it comes to selecting text." I have to wholeheartedly agree.

I am a heavy mouse (and trackpad) user and have been for decades. Editing and refactoring code for me is all about the mouse. The same goes for editing prose, which I also write a significant quantity of.

The two-finger, on-glass "trackpad cursor" trick doesn't work well for me--it never has. It looks like the "ghost caret" is in the right place, but at least half the time, when I lift my fingers the cursor appears a character off in either direction. Verrry frustrating. Also, the two-finger trick requires the on screen keyboard and is clumsy to use if you are using an external keyboard.

About a year ago I gave up on my personal quest to use the iPad as a heavy writing device. It's just not for me. I picked up a bottom-of-the-line 12" Macbook and have never looked back.

> I am a heavy mouse (and trackpad) user and have been for decades. Editing and refactoring code for me is all about the mouse.

It's a very interesting and surprising statement to me. For me the mouse is absolutely nowhere near convince of selecting text with keyboard. When your editor allows you to jump between paragraphs, words, ending and beginning of line (so pretty much every editor) it seems to be relatively easy to rapidly jump to place that one wants to select with couple of key strokes.

I would definitely agree that my mousing is not as efficient as an expert-level keyboard only approach. But it's what I do and what is comfortable to me. Random text selection in big bodies of text is always easier (for me) with a mouse first, trackpad next, keyboard last.

Keyboarding, mousing, editing is a very personal thing to folks who have to work at their computer all day. Lot's of different ways to work, lots of approaches to the work. Each person has to find their comfort zone.

>The only thing that's really missing to make editing text on the ipad a breeze is a way to select while moving the cursor with the two finger gesture above.

You can. Double-tap a word or character so it's selected, then do the two-finger select gesture on the keyboard.

You can go one better than that: double tap with two fingers on the software keyboard to initiate a selection on the current word and then drag to extend selection.

You don't need to double tap on the actual text or characters, you just tap-then-drag with two fingers on the software keyboard.

Amazing, thanks! I tried various versions of single finger tapping but the result is usually both disastrous and expected, replacing the selection with a single letter.

Yeah, I didn't think of that and it goes part of the way, but it would be nice if you could move the cursor to the exact position you want to select from, put down a third finger on the keyboard and then move the cursor. At least for me that would feel more efficient.

Yeah, that seems like it would be the best way, at least until they get 3D Touch on an iPad. On the iPhone you move the cursor with a light 3d touch on the keyboard, then can start a selection by pressing down harder.

Brilliant, that detail was news to me, even though I had tried versions of that.

Son of a bitch, thanks for that first tip. But this speaks to a greater problem of feature discoverability on these devices.

And if you have a phone with force touch you can force press the keyboard to do the same thing!

You can also tap-then-drag with two fingers to do text selection right from the keyboard.