user interface The Windows 95 feature that smartphones still don't have in 2024.

[Ertio]

This is a feature that Windows 95 and probably even earlier versions of Windows like 3.1 had.

 

It is shift+click range selection.

 

This is a standard feature we take for granted on desktop and laptop computers since before the beginning of this century. But how about the computers we stuff into our pockets?

 

It is 2024 and the best way to select large amounts of text or items in a long list such as in a file manager on a smartphone is often "drag-to-select". This means touching, dragging upwards or downwards, and then waiting for the screen to scroll to the desired position.

 

While it is still far more convenient than individual selection (ouch! Thinking about it hurts.), it is still far from range selection.

 

Many mobile apps don't even feature a draggable scrollbar, let alone range selection, where as desktop and laptop computers have had shift+click selection and the "Home" and "End" keys for several decades. Windows File Explorer (since Windows 8, 2012) and some Linux file managers even have an "invert selection" feature. When will smartphone file managers get this? 2035?

 

Drag-to-select is fine for anything below 50 items. But what if you want to select 3000 items without having to wait for half an hour, shift+click range selection is the only way of doing it. Shift+Home and Shift+End let you select either everything from or everything to a certain point as well.

Sure, there is also a "select all" option, but sometimes you just want to select a range of items, for example, when you want to move photos from one event into a separate folder.

 

Remember the golden days of ES File Explorer, before 2016, when it turned into adware, and before 2014, when Android started crippling storage access to third-party developers? ES File Explorer had range selection since 2012.

 

Billion-dollar conglomerates like Google and Samsung failed at something that third-party hobbyist developers could do in 2012. How embarrassing.