UX: Shift + space bar swipe for selecting text feels unexpected and unintuitive if you don't know how it works and do it by accident

[abstractionmage]

I never knew that the Unexpecred Keyboard allows you to select text by pressing shift and sliding left or right across the space bar until I watched the demo video on your GitHub readme today, and while that's a missed opportunity in its own right it also caused me some problems when I activated that feature by accident:

When I write a longer text messages like this UX issue report I usually start by writing my thoughts down top to bottom and then go over the message a few time to add more details, improve my wording, fix typos, connect sentences in meaningful ways or even rewrite entire passages. While I'm doing that, it sometimes happens that I press the Shift key to start a new sentence, only to realize that I actually want to edit a different part of my message. I swipe right on the space bar in order to move my cursor to the new location, but quickly realize that I am actually making a selection. I get totally spooked because I have no idea why that is happening and I instinctively and without thinking press on the space bar to exit the selection mode, which deletes my selection irreversibly.

I had exactly that happen to me a fair number of times already. A rare event given that I've used Unexpected Keyboard exclusively ever since I discovered it a few years ago, but when it happens it's always pretty annoying. I would say that, depending on luck and my phone usage, this happens somewhere between once a month and once a year.

While I wanted to report this UX issue, I can't say I have any good ideas about solving it.

• Maybe an in-app tutorial could make people aware of this feature?
• Moving the key that engages the selection mode away from the shift key might help against users entering the space bar selection mode by accident. Perhaps you could move that function to the Fn key or the modifier key between the space bar and the enter key (I still have no idea what that key does, btw.)

[Spike-from-NH]

I've done that too. Moreover, when the keyboard is shifted (for any reason, including auto-cap), merely scrolling the text window makes a gigantic selection. I've written elsewhere that mistakenly swiping southeast from A often selected all—usually replaced everything with my next keystroke long before I knew what I did. This problem was solved by moving SelectAll to the west swipe.

You will quickly, if painfully, learn not to press Space to "cancel the mode." You can learn all the other quirks too. How to help new users learn quickly and not painfully is a valid question.

The key between Space and Enter is the arrow keys, if you swipe it. If you tap it, it's the Compose key; see my reply at #886.

[tenextractor]

@abstractionmage It's not irreversible, you can press Ctrl+Z to undo.

[Spike-from-NH]

It's not irreversible, you can press Ctrl+Z to undo.

Not always. The Undo function depends on the editor you're using to store the text it's deleting from the file, to be able to restore it. Unexpected Keyboard doesn't store this text (to type it back in) and some text-editor apps don't either.