Press and hold the space bar, then you can move your thumb side to side to drag the cursor
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
37 points (89.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43411 readers
1472 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Seems like it’s going to work, then the cursor jumps back to wherever it was. Is there some technique for this to work?
iPhone text selection and text manipulation in general is abysmal imo. I find typing on my iPhone to be seriously challenging.
Thank fuck because as an android user who swapped to iPhone recently I’ve thought it was just a me problem..?
It’s so bad, and the keyboards suck. I miss my number line and long-press secondary characters. So so much.
Gøógłę kēÿbôård.
Hard pass. Even on android I hated the gboard. Absolutely not willing to let them view all my typing to use it, even if it’s hands down better than the iOS board.
Apple getting that info is bad enough (I assume they do even if they say they don’t) I don’t need to open to a second known-bad entity (because it will be both, not one or the other, I know what apple does with development)
(Maybe that was the joke? I worry about this all the time..)
It feels like the iPhone keyboard changed and this happens significantly more often now. I think it’s apple trying to “help”
hold down space and scrub around, and let go when you have the cursor positioned
With some experimentation, I found this works with SwiftKey keyboard, but is unusable with the Apple keyboard. Not sure what to make of that.
It works on my iPad but I have to use two fingers on the spacebar.
This is a feature. Also can be on the whole keyboard, not just the spacebar I believe
It wasn’t like this originally. Something changed recently and it’s now hit or miss.
Whoa, this works on Android too. I had no idea you could do that! Thanks for the tip!
This is a game changer.
You just place your finger on where you generally want it to go, and hold it there for a moment until a “magnifying glass” pops up that allows you to drag and place it precisely.
edit:
just want to add that I don’t think I ever read this anywhere. I discovered it while mildly enraged, when I poked and held the screen while saying “FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUU” and then the magnifying thing appeared and I was like “oh”
Wait, what??? Oh my gods... it works on Android too.
If you slide your finger along the spacebar you can move the cursor as well
I saw somewhere that on an iphone you can also longpress the spacebar and slide around. Don't have an iphone tho, so no idea, but i thought that was a good idea.
I just tried this on my iPad, because this is its most irritating flaw. Sadly it didn't work, and nor did the space-bar "trick". The only option if the word isn't in the dictionary is to erase and try again. It's absolutely infuriating when I've typed out a long name, only to find a typo near the start. It's actually easier to write stuff on my (Android) phone, despite the much smaller screen, because I can place the cursor exactly where I want.
Which part didn’t work? You didn’t have the magnifying glass appear?
No, no magnifying glass, it just highlighted the word, options to cut or copy.
If you’re trying to place the cursor on a misspelled word, it may default to highlighting it every time. Try sneaking it in by touching and holding on a word nearby, and wait for the magnifying glass to appear before dragging onto the misspelled word. And it’s just a regular touch without breaking contact, not pressing like trying to use the haptic functions.
Mate, I have tried every which in the three years I've owned the iPad. It will not allow the cursor to be placed anywhere but the end or the start of a word. As an annoyance it's up there with the exclamation and question marks not being grouped with the rest of the punctuation.
Well, I believe you, but I don’t know what the problem could be then. I do this on two different ipads and an iphone, and it’s always worked for me. I did it twice just fixing autocorrects in this reply.
I have the same issue. Seems like a bug.
Once upon a time, Swype / FlexT9 / whatever other names it's had on Android used to have an option to bring up a virtual D pad in the keyboard area. It was really easy to swap to as well, and being able to flip over to a functional set of arrow keys (as well as select, copy, paste, etc) made text editing so much easier.
Like all things I used to enjoy about Android, it got removed in the name of copying Apples simplicity.
SwiftKey still offers it.
why you have an Iphone?
They’re generally decent devices with long term support. I judge Apple to be marginally less evil than Google.