Strange Behavior When Selecting Title Text on iPhone and iPad

Bear feedback Bear Bug Report
1

On iPhone and iPad, when you double tap the first words of a note title, the selection automatically shifts to the last two or three words of the title. In other apps, what you actually tap on is selected, and you can expand the selection from there.

I’ve attached a video to show what I mean.

I’m using the latest App Store versions on both devices.

2

This looks indeed odd. Are you using the last stable iPadOS release or the beta? Do you still experience this problem after a device reboot?

3

I’m seeing this behavior on my iPhone, iPad Mini and iPad Pro, all running normal software. No betas and all updated, and persists after restart.

Double tapping the first word within a header selects any detected people or places in the sentence. It does not happen in non-header sentences, nor does it happen when headers don’t include people or places. I figured out that a triple tap selects the entire sentence, which is what I’m usually trying to do.

I’ve dug through my accessibility settings to see if I’ve got some weird text selection option checked, but everything looks normal.

Here’s an example note header:

The Incredible Power of the Index Card by Ryan Holiday

Can you confirm that double tapping on the word “The” in a note with this text as an H1 formatted header selects “Ryan Holiday”?

If I double tap the word “incredible” it selects just that word. If I change the title from a heading to plain text, double tapping “The” selects “The” as normal. I’ve tried this in both Ulysses and Drafts and they also select “The” as you’d expect, so it doesn’t feel like a iOS/iPad system issue. However, if you can’t replicate this behavior, then I must have a weird setting checked somewhere. Thanks for looking into this!

4

Surprisingly, we discovered iOS has some personal name smart selection functionality. When I first tried I did not replicate the exact title of your note but when I did We noticed the name was selected regardless of the position in the title.

Online I have not found clues about how to turn it off in iOS preferences and we are quite unsure if we can bypass it in Bear’s code. We’ll continue the investigation.

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