- Textastic for iOS
- iPad
-
Questions
New user, selection and keyboard access difficulty on iPad
I recently purchased Textastic and have been working on live PHP/HTML/JS with AJAX files via FTP. It's great to be able to code somewhere other than at my desk.
I've been having trouble controlling when the screen keyboard comes up. Is there a button or gesture that activates it? It seems difficult to get a text select that causes the keyboard to appear. I usually have to de-select, then tap once or more elsewhere for the keyboard to come up. Also, sometimes when I do tap in a spot for an insertion cursor, the keyboard comes up and covers it, I would expect the code to scroll up a bit so the cursor can be seen. Often, when I swipe up to expose it, it doesn't seem like the insertion point is showing. In unsure if it wasn't placed, or if it's not visible.
Any suggestions? Thank you!
Troy
P.S. For some reason I feel like this isn't a problem on the iPhone version, but I haven't used that much.
Customer support service by UserEcho
Just do a single tap on the code editor to make the keyboard appear. You can then select text by double-tapping.
If you do a double tap instead when the keyboard is not shown yet, you only select the word under your finger. This allows you to select text and copy it to the clipboard without bringing up the keyboard.
Thank you Alexander! I will try to remember to do that. My habit has been to select the 2nd way, probably tapping twice because the first tap didn't seem to work. Then having to lose my selection to bring up the keyboard.
I wonder if it would be possible to add a show-hide keyboard button on one of the tool bars? I actually find using the keyboard's copy and paste buttons are more reliable than the dark-bubble-above-the-selection options, some times they don't appear, or they appear when I don't want them to making moving the text-selection-start blue dot difficult, or they appear but don't have the desired copy or paste option available! (On that latter, it has happened a lot, but I don't recall which it is that is missing. But the keyboard one works.) I end up using the cursor navigation wheel a lot. Thanks for that tool!
If it would help I believe I could video these things.
Thank you!
Did you see that you can enable the standard copy/paste buttons above the keyboard in Textastic's settings? The setting is called "Shortcuts".
They are disabled by default to make room for Textastic's swipeable additional keys.
Yes, I have been using the cut, copy and paste buttons on the keyboard. I prefer them to the dark popup bubble buttons which don't always appear or have the option I need.
I agree, having them enabled makes the keyboard so large there is little room left to edit. But I love the swipeable keys.
Here is a screenshot of a case where I have placed the cursor and the keyboard has come up, but it covers the insertion point and the editing bubble:
Here is a case where the dark popup bubble doesn't that the editing option I want, "Copy" is missing:
I hope this shows the trouble!
Thank you for your reply.
Thanks for the screenshots! I'll look into it.