pachli-android
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pachli
Long-press on hyperlinks should bring up a dialog
Tapping on a link opens the link in a browser immediately. Long-pressing a link has no effect.
Describe the solution you'd like I would expect a menu with different actions or the share action where I can decide to copy the link to the clipboard or send it to a specific app.
Describe alternatives you've considered A workaround is to tap on the link so that is opened in the browser and then copy it or share it from there. However, for various reasons I don't always want to open the link right away.
You can select the text in posts, including links, but only after tapping that specific post to view it. Here's a vid:
https://github.com/pachli/pachli-android/assets/16272279/2a708f79-f040-464f-96f6-5b87444ca17b
But by contrast, you can tap links in posts to open them in your browser without having to first tap the post. I agree that it would make sense to align these behaviors: any place where you can tap a link to open it in your browser, you should also be able to also long-press links without having to first tap the post.
I just saw this same feature request (as a Mastodon post) from someone else recently, so this is definitely something we should improve. Thanks for filing the issue!
Sure, you can do that after opening the post. Mark and copy is a very crude way to use links though and I strongly advise against it as it frequently causes butchered links. In my opinion, fairemail has the most laudable handling of links. It always brings up a dialog, warns about trackers, HTTP and offers using the default app or a custom one. Of course, you can turn this feature completly off, if you prefer. I guess that would be overkill in case of mastodon but I wanted to mention it anyway. Then again links on mastodon are not magically safer than links in emails. Also it's sometimes guesswork to tell what a tap in which place actually causes what action but this is kind of normal with mobile apps. I don't mean this as a rant.
@cbiere, agreed - no rantiness taken 🙂
I think the experience when selecting links should be more like it is in other apps, meaning a dedicated context menu with at least an option to copy, but maybe also other options like share. I'm thinking of Firefox's behavior around links - you can select any text on a web page, but links get their own context menu on long-press. I haven't used fairemail but feel free to post a screenshot or recording if you feel it does an especially good job around this UI.
Agreed the handling in Firefox is just fine (open/copy/share).
Fairemail is a bit of an acquired taste and somewhat overwhelming if not intimidating at first:
I don't agree with all its UX choices as it's a bit redundant and noisy but it's a great email client (if not the best on Android).
Given that there's a "Do not ask again" checkbox, I'm guessing that FairEmail has this dialog appear whenever you tap a link? I think most people would expect tapping a link to directly open it via the default browser, and I think that's probably the best behavior to go with. It would make sense to have a dedicated menu on long-press, but I agree that this FairEmail menu feels kind of excessive. On the other hand, the integration with ipinfo.io does sound cool. Maybe we start by adding an open/copy/share menu like Firefox and then we could think about what other options would be beneficial? I want to have useful options, I just don't want it to end up too cluttered.
This'll be implemented very shortly.
Long pressing a link (or a mention, or a hashtag) will show the normal Android "share sheet", with the link. From there you can copy it, or share it with any of the apps there.
In this screenshot I long-pressed on the link highlighted with the arrow:
