Who else can not type one text message without at least one typing error in it? Who else is out there also struggling to correct typos because it takes at least five times to hold the cursor and drag it to the exact space you want between those two lowercase letters?
My friends, today our struggle ends.
There seems to be an easy, infinitely less annoying way to edit your texts: by using your iPhone keyboard as a trackpad.
This feature was previously only available on older Apple products with 3D Touch capability (). It now works on any Apple device with iOS 12 or higher.
Let’s show you how it works, shall we?
You have a typo in a text you want to edit. First bring your finger to the space bar. Tap and hold until all the keys are empty, as you will see in the picture below.
Empty keys indicate you are in trackpad mode
While holding, you can now move your finger across the bottom of your screen to point the cursor where you want, without your finger obstructs your view of the pointer.
As our senior editor Stan Schroeder when iOS 12 was released:
“It’s even more useful. In keyboard trackpad mode, you can select a word by pressing deep into it; press deeper to select the entire paragraph. And on iOS 12, you can do something similar without 3D Touch. Tap and hold hold down the space bar to enter the keyboard trackpad mode, then tap anywhere on the keyboard with another finger (do not tap and hold, tap and release) to open the text selection mode, now slide your thumb up and down to select text.
“Watch both variants of the feature in the video below.
“This is especially useful on the iPad, which for some reason does not have 3D Touch in one of its variants. If for some reason you have not updated your iPad to iOS 12, you can still access the feature in a slightly different form: Tap anywhere on the keyboard to enter trackpad mode, then move one finger (while still holding the other) to move the cursor around.
“The new version of the feature is also ideal for owners of 3D Touch-less iPhones and the sixth-generation iPod Touch, which had no access to iOS 12.”