Who else out there can’t type out a single text message without at least one typo in it? Who else out there also has a hard time fixing said typos because it takes at least five tries to hold and drag the cursor to the exact space you want, right between those two tiny letters?
My friends, today our struggle ends.
Turns out, there’s an easier, infinitely less annoying way to edit your texts: by using your iPhone keyboard as a trackpad.
This feature used to be available only on older Apple products with 3D Touch capability (which has since been discontinued and replaced by Haptic Touch on the newer devices). It now works on any Apple device running iOS 12 or higher.
Let us show ya how it works, shall we?
You have a typo in a text you’d like to edit. First, bring your finger to the space bar. Tap and hold until all of the keys go blank, as you’ll see in the image below.
Blank keys indicate you’re in trackpad mode
Image: andy moser
As you’re holding, you can now move your finger across the bottom of your screen to direct the cursor wherever you want, without your finger obstructing your view of the cursor.
As our senior editor Stan Schroeder put it when iOS 12 was released:
“It gets even more useful. On 3D Touch devices, while in keyboard trackpad mode, you can select a word by deep-pressing into it; press deeper to select the whole paragraph. And on iOS 12, you can do something similar without 3D Touch. Tap and hold the space bar to enter keyboard trackpad mode. Then, tap anywhere on the keyboard with another finger (don’t tap and hold, just tap and release) to enter text selection mode. Now move the thumb up and down to select text.
“Check out both variants of the feature in the video, below.
“This is especially useful on the iPad, which, for some reason, doesn’t have 3D Touch in any of its variants. If for any reason you haven’t updated your iPad to iOS 12, you can still access the feature in a slightly different form: Tap with two fingers anywhere on the keyboard to enter trackpad mode, then move one finger (while still holding down the other) to move the cursor around.
“The new version of the feature is also great for owners of 3D Touch-less iPhones and the sixth-generation iPod Touch, who had no way to access it until iOS 12 came along.”