I did not know this and it’s a godsend. I have otherwise found iOS cursor positioning to be awful, especially when text selection is involved as well. Thank you.
…but the whole mobile experience is still terrible with a lot of scrolling, panning, and annoying text selection.
I’m aware most people don’t type that fast so they would never type on mobile but for those that do, it would be sweet if the mobile experience was better.
One thing I found out on iOS recently is that you can shake your phone for text undo.
(because of the body positioning - back, neck - and the hard surface)
(not arguing against improving typing on mobile, obviously)
Truthfully I’m most worried about the thumbs. I feel like they can ache if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours
It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward. Being completely undiscoverable doesn’t help.
Maybe we need something like the old thinkpad nub on touchscreen keyboards.
Actually I just discovered the spacebar trick thanks to the parent comment and... I can move up and down in a block of text by using the same method.
Maybe I don't understand what you mean?
Now try moving down 10 lines from where you start. Hopefully you will see the issue with starting from the spacebar at the bottom edge of the screen.
1. The space bar is a much smaller target than the original whole keyboard and I often find myself needing multiple press drags.
2. Something changed recently and it is harder to hit your placement target in text especially in single line inputs. When this happens your cursor ends up back where it was or at the start of the line. It is particularly difficult to edit or select a url in the safari menu bar.
Note: I used the space bar cursor placement at least 5 times writing this. It would have been much more difficult without.
First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a pain. I can do it if I’m away from a computer and have to, but I don’t enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of concentration.
As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it.
I do think text editing could always be better and I actually think it’s a pretty broad use case. I’m also not convinced mobile is easily adapted to it, especially without really good text input [probably speech] which also isn’t suitable in a lot of situations.