4-way direction arrow keyset brought up with gesture

Hi, sounds like a good idea, but I already tried to implement gestures for cursor navigation. See my latest comment at http://feedback.textasticapp.com/feedback/15671-gestures-do-navigate-page-up-page-down-etc-it-would-make-life-much-easier/

It was really slow and interfered with scrolling and zooming gestures.

I think I need a way to do this with buttons but without taking away too much space. I already have something in mind - I believe I saw a similar solution in iSSH: a "navigation wheel" with cursor buttons that appears above the text when you do a double-tap on the editor.

Oh, and of course a bluetooth keyboard or a keyboard dock are great ways to circumvent this problem :)

Yep, with a keyboard attached, it isn't an issue. But that ease of use makes me pine for the above idea when using without a keyboard.

Ok, I just re-read your idea and I have to apologize: your suggestion was actually very similar to what I posted above. I must have misunderstood your post the first time.

So, yes, your idea is definitely a good one!

Thanks, glad you are considering it. I had another idea this morning, but coding-wise this might be considerably more difficult to enact: once the above-proposed direction arrow pop up is implemented, perhaps in the center of the 4 arrows would be a shift key that could be used to make a text selection. for example: user makes gesture to bring up arrows, and moves the cursor one line up and over a bit, then toggles the shift key and hits the left arrow 5 times to select a word. i'm not sure if the text selection APIs in iOS would even allow for this, but just wanted to throw it out there.

Since I had to write my own text selection routines for syntax highlighting to work, this would be possible.

Ever tried iTeleport?
I want two finger scrolling to move cursor slowly up/down/left/right. This would be much neater

No, I haven't yet. Thanks for the pointer!