thunder-app
Links in posts/comments are difficult to tap on
Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem?
I'm routinely finding it hard to correctly align a tap on links within the text of posts and comments. I've turned the font size up to try and make the tap targets larger, though I'd rather have it at the regular size.
This is particularly painful with comments: if you miss, the comment tree gets collapsed instead which is quite jarring.
Feature Description
Ideally, taps of links to be more forgiving. I don't know how feasible that is though if it's just relying on a standard Android rich text view or similar.
Alternative Solutions
Long-pressing a link brings up a panel with a preview and open/share links, whilst long-pressing a comment brings up a menu of actions -- perhaps a submenu of links in the comment could be added to the main actions menu, so that you can go Actions > Link Actions > Some link text > the preview panel as if long-pressing that specific link?
Additional Context
Weirdly I have not noticed this problem in any other apps, which leads me to think they do something to expand the "hit" area of links. From a brief play in Firefox for Android, it does feel like I don't need to be as accurate with my taps there -- I would not be surprised to find that browsers and webviews make links more usable in this regard as standard.
I'm not sure if this contributes much to the conversation, but one observation I've made is that it feels harder to tap links due to the lack of an inkwell on the link text itself. Other apps provide a clear visual feedback when you've actually made contact with the link. We tried to add inkwells a while back, but they broke some of the rendering. It might help to bring that back.
Whether this is a real issue with Thunder having a smaller touch target for links is a good question though!
I also like the idea of making all links in a given comment accessible from the long-press sheet. That shouldn't be too hard.
I suggest these little link previews for links in comments that also make them much easier to tap on. I really like what Apollo was doing:
Just adding in to this conversation as well - it looks like the main reason why links are harder to tap is because the markdown library doesn't respect the system's default minimum size for taps (kMinInteractiveDimension). Because of this, the overall size of links have a much smaller "tappable" area.
The related issue is here: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/82228
The linked issue on the flutter codebase was closed as not planned last week. I'm not sure if that specific problem has been resolved elsewhere.
