BetterTextSelection makes precise paragraph text selection possible on iOS

bettertextselection-before-and-after

There are a lot of people who get away with using iOS‘ text selection just fine, but there are others who hate the way it’s implemented and find using it to be a pain in the hind quarters.

A new free jailbreak tweak release called BetterTextSelection aims to make the text selection feature in iOS a little more precise, especially in the context of selecting large excerpts of text from blocky paragraphs on a web page.

In any WebKit-enabled app on your iPhone or iPad, or simply in Safari, you might notice that when you try and select a large portion of a paragraph, such as around 80% of it, the selection grabbers will automatically encase the entire paragraph, as shown above on the left.

For many, this is an unacceptable assumption that we want to select the entire paragraph, and BetterTextSelection, which is the answer given for a disgruntled iOS user on /r/jailbreak, does away with that silly assumption to make it easier to fine-grain your text selection from blocky paragraphs.

Once you install this tweak, you will be able to precisely choose your text selection in any paragraph in WebKit-enabled apps each and every time without iOS automatically selecting the entire paragraph on you, as shown above on the right.

This does away with having your text selection grabbers jumping all around the screen when you don’t want them to, and prevents you from having to start over with iOS’ cumbersome text selection feature every time it doesn’t work to your liking.

BetterTextSelection is available completely free of cost from Cydia’s BigBoss repository and it doesn’t have any options to configure, so if you’re jailbroken and share the same views as this Reddit poster, download this tweak and you’re set to go.