+4
Under review

Please support “trackpad” functionality on iPad with external keyboard to select text and navigate document

Per 6 years ago in iPad updated by MattY 6 years ago 3

Using an iPad with a physical keyboard with Textastic is really powerful. It would become even more powerful if you can use the touchscreen as a trackpad to navigate documents and select text. This is possible in iOS 12. Check out this tweet for details.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1061198300878135296?s=21

Would love this!

This should be possible to make work when using the iOS text APIs.

Under review

The problem is that this is only available in native UITextView instances. For Textastic I've implemented a fully custom text view based on the UITextInput protocol. This means that I would have to re-implement the functionality Apple implemented for UITextView. It's not just a simple switch, but would take some days.


You can still move the cursor by moving two fingers over the on-screen keyboard. It just doesn't work on the editor itself.

Thanks for the additional detail and consideration.

This feature is indeed only relevant in tne case that you are using an external keyboard like the Apple keyboard or a Bluetooth keybord.


This would be a great feature. I came onto to this site to suggest the same thing. It would be great if you could allow in settings to disable the two finger zoom that currently exists and let two fingers select the text. Even though I have the Apple Pencil I find it annoyingly slow to select text compare to my Mac and really want to use the iPad Pro as my main dev machine. I see it isn’t an easy switch on from your comment, but would love for you to implement this :)