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Completed

4-way direction arrow keyset brought up with gesture

scott o. 13 years ago updated by Alexander Blach (Developer) 13 years ago 8
Most frustrating part of doing coding on iOS is the clunky way you have to move the cursor around, it's by far the biggest bottleneck in terms of productivity. Often you just want to move i over one or two spaces, or up or down a line, and using the iOS method is just sheer pain.

It's a radical idea, but I'd love a simple gesture (two finger swipe, or something) to bring up a floating keyset with the 4 direction arrows. It would be sheer bliss when moving the cursor around, and it could be dismissed with the same gesture.

Answer

Answer
Completed
Added in Textastic 2.2.
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.
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Oh, and of course a bluetooth keyboard or a keyboard dock are great ways to circumvent this problem :)
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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.
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Ever tried iTeleport?
I want two finger scrolling to move cursor slowly up/down/left/right. This would be much neater
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No, I haven't yet. Thanks for the pointer!
Answer
Completed
Added in Textastic 2.2.