click-and-hold highlighted text to reposition it

[GlennMartin1]

(I'm using Gutenberg 1.6.1)

Most text editors allow you to click-and-hold highlighted text while dragging it to a new insertion point.

(if you're not familiar with this, try it in Word or Google Docs, etc.... Simply highlight word(s) and then click-and-hold that highlighted to drag it to a new insertion point.)

Word supports this.
Google Docs supports this.
Text boxes in Windows support this.
Text boxes in browsers support this.
The Classic Editor supports this.

Most/all places where this is supported also allows image anchors to be repositioned by dragging the image.

However, none of this works in Gutenberg. I believe it's a reasonable expectation for any text box, but particularly so in any text editor.

[ellatrix]

This has been disabled due to the way we handle cross block selection. I see no reason however to not make this work for text. Images are something different though, as this completely clashes with block multi selection. Not sure how to solve that.

[aaronjorbin]

Assigning to 5.0 based on @iseulde's last comment

[mtias]

@iseulde do you think we'll be able to do anything meaningful here in time?

[ellatrix]

If it's meaningful enough to prioritise, probably. :)

[GlennMartin1]

This issue persists in Gutenberg 5.3.

[mapk]

How will this work in relation to #20078 (comment) which talks about a long-press action for dragging and dropping blocks?

Will we be able to discern between a long-press to drag highlighted text vs. a long-press on a block to drag a block?

[mtias]

If there's partially selected text it wouldn't drag the entire block.