When pasting text into a text editing window on iOS (anywhere – browser text field like the one I’m typing in now, address bar, iOS search bar, etc.), iOS seems to try to make an educated guess as to whether or not it should insert a space before the pasted text. Well, I say ‘educated’ … the actual logic seems to be to add a space if there isn’t one already, regardless of what comes before.
To me, this is extremely frustrating, because I never, under any circumstances want it to insert a space before my pasted text. If I want a space, I will type a space.
I frequently find myself pasting individual hard-to-type characters (for example when typing IPA), and this is practically impossible to do elegantly because everything you paste becomes a separate word, and then you need to try to use the terrible fine-selection cursor thingy to move one character back and delete a space.1
Needless to say, doing the same thing on macOS works exactly as expected.
Is there some way to disable this behaviour and always paste exactly what is in the clipboard, with no extra spaces being added anywhere?
1 Even worse, if the copied text is a combining Unicode character, such as a diacritic, it seems to be completely impossible to achieve the desired result, as far as I can tell. For example, yesterday I wanted to write the title Scáṫán na ḃFíréan: Leaḃar urnuiḋṫe caitliciḋe in a Tweet on my phone, so I found a website where I could copy the combining dot above diacritic; but typing ‘Scát’ and then pasting the combining diacritic left me with ‘Scát˙’, with a space added before the diacritic, rather than the expected ‘Scáṫ’.
