All the secret iPhone Keyboard tricks you are still unaware of

By now, you might have come across dozens of articles demonstrating how you can take advantage of the 3D Touch on iDevices to sift through the different characters or lines of the written material. Though the trick is pretty nifty, it’s strange to see how many people were unaware of such a small feature that has existed for years now.

In case you didn’t come across any such article and are still wondering what the above paragraph is about, here’s the tip for you in one simple step:

Touch and hold on any part of the keyboard (Spacebar being more convenient) to sift through the text.

Note: This trick only works on devices that support 3D Touch.

With that said, there are still a few tricks with an iPhone’s keyboard that most people are unaware of, but can take advantage of to get the most out of it.

Let’s get started!

iPhone Keyboard Tricks

Shake to undo

One of the most common tricks involves shaking the device to undo a recent action, which can be either be a ‘delete’ or a ‘recent paste’. For this, all you need to do is:

1. Shake your device.
2. Select ‘Undo’ or ‘Redo typing’.

And that’s it.
Your input field is back to the previous state.

Dictate to input text

There are times when you don’t feel like entering text manually using the keyboard, at such times Dictation is your friend. To use it, you need to:

1. Tap on the mic button left to the spacebar.
2. Start speaking.

You can also ask it to do things like, “break the text on to a new line”, “switch letter case”, and even “start a new paragraph”.

Easy Toggle

Changing keyboard settings can be cumbersome, and requires a few steps to navigate through the settings. However, there’s a neat trick that you can use to land directly into keyboard settings. For this, you need to:

1. Press and hold the globe icon on the bottom row, next to dictate icon.
2. A pop-up appears with different options like – ‘Keyboard Settings’, ‘Keyboard Language’, ‘Emoji’, and ‘Alternate keyboard’ (if you have one).
3. Drag the cursor to select any of the options and let it go.

One-handed Keyboard

For some of us with a larger Plus size iPhone and not adequately large hands, typing can be a real workout. So to overcome the hassle of typing on a larger iPhone, the one-handed keyboard can be utilized. To toggle it, you can:

1. Use the ‘Easy Toggle’ method to open the pop-up menu.
2. Select from the two keyboard icons present on the bottom left or right side of the popup for either the ‘left-handed’ mode or the ‘right-handed’ mode respectively.

And in case you wish to go back to full-keyboard, you can hit the arrow key provided.

Shortcuts

Also known as ‘Text Replacement’.

Similar to how you can dictate text instead of typing, in the same way, you can also pre-define a phrase against a simple acronym. The most obvious use case scenario would be when you have to type some redundant message every time. However, it can be used in any way you want.

To demonstrate, let’s say you have a message like- ‘On my way!’ or ‘Talk to you later.’. Instead of typing the text every time, you can assign a shortcut like – ‘omw’ or ‘ttyl’ respectively, which can be entered instead of the entire phrase. To enable this trick, you need to:

1. Head to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Or use the ‘Easy Toggle’ method mentioned above.
2. Hit the plus icon on the top right.
3. Enter the phrase that you want to replace using a shortcut.
4. Enter the replacement acronym in the shortcut field.

Quick Formatting

Sometimes, you want to highlight or emphasize some part of the text to make it stand out from the rest. In such situations, you can easily format the text directly. For this, you need to:

1. Long press on the input field, until you see a formatting pop-up below the text.
2. Select the text that you want to format.
3. Once done, you can either use ‘Bold’, ‘Italic’, ‘Underline’, or ‘Strikethrough’ to format your text.
4. You can also, indent your text to the left or the right using ‘Index Right’ or ‘Index left’ option.

In addition to that, you can hit the right or left arrow key to select other options like ‘Spell’ – to get the spelling of entered text, Speak’ – to listen to the text you just entered, or ‘Look Up’ – to pull up Wikipedia, Dictionary, or any other information for the entered text. The ‘Look Up’ option can be selected to know the exact meaning of the word before using it in context to something, or for finding an alternative to the word.

Special Characters

In addition to typing simple characters on the keyboard, the keyboard also provides options to key-in other special characters like – ä æœ ø ú ū è é ê ë. Apparently, you don’t get to see these characters on the keyboard. So if you ever come across a situation where you need to enter such characters, you need to:

1. Press and hold on the related/similar character.
2. Drag and slide through the different characters and leave to enter.

Caps Lock

Though you use it all the time, you might not be aware of an even better way to do it. Instead of pressing the shift key (arrow-up) to switch between the upper and lower case letters, you can:

1. Press the shift key and drag to the key that you want to enter in uppercase, which takes away the additional step to press the shift key to switch to an uppercase keyboard before entering the character.
2. Double press the shift key to enable an uppercase keyboard to enter text in uppercase to make an impact.

In addition to all the above tricks, you can also change some basic keyboard settings like:

Managing various keyboards: adding or removing keyboards and input languages.
Auto-Capitalisation: pretty self-explanatory, capitalises text after, say a full-stop.
Auto-Correction: corrects mistakes made during typing.
Smart-Punctuation: makes punctuations look more pleasing and smart, obviously.
Character-Preview: provides a preview to the character as typed, useful when you type without looking at the keyboard by providing a pop-up which the peripheral vision can check for any mistakes.
Check-Spelling: highlights mistakes by underlining them in red.
Predictive: auto-predicts the next word using your usage behavior.