Nowadays we are all perfectly accustomed to writing on our mobile phones. Despite this, there are several keyboard tricks that many people don’t know about and that allow us to save some time when writingOne of these tricks is the one that allows us to control the cursor more precisely through gestures, something we can do by holding down the space bar and sliding our finger across the keyboard.
The limited space on the mobile screen makes it impossible to have access to all the keys in one view. For this reason, both iOS and Android allow us to access the numeric keypad by pressing the ‘123’ key on iOS or ‘?123’ on Android. The numeric keypad also contains punctuation marks, which means that we use the key we have mentioned a large number of times every day.
The trick is especially useful when entering passwords from your mobile phone.
Obviously, having to change keyboards to enter a number or punctuation mark every time we send a message is not a big deal, but it can make things difficult when entering passwords that combine letters, numbers and symbols: It’s easy to get a character wrong and having to re-enter the password from scratch.
Luckily, there is a trick that allows us to save some time (and avoid mistakes) if we have to switch between both keyboards several times. The trick consists of Press and hold the ‘123’ key on iOS or ‘?123’ on Android when we want to type a number or a punctuation mark, as it prevents us from having to switch back to the normal keyboard manually after pressing the number.
Let’s give an example to understand it better.. Imagine you have to enter the password 4huX9b9B6uHGH3cZaHDT2PQh from your mobile phone. Every time you have to type a number, you will have to switch to the numeric keypad by pressing the ‘123’ or ‘?123’ key and then press ‘ABC’ to return to the normal keyboard. As you can imagine, the process can be a bit cumbersome and it is easy to make mistakes.
As you can see, by holding down the ‘123’ key on iOS or ‘?123’ on Android you can press the corresponding number or punctuation mark and when you release the key the normal keyboard will reappear automaticallyThis way you save yourself from having to press the ABC key every time you need to return to the normal keyboard.
We have already mentioned that on the numeric keypad we also find punctuation marks and other characters such as the euro symbol or at sign (@). Therefore, this trick also allows you to return to the normal keyboard automatically after using any of these characters.
At this point it is interesting to highlight another trick that will allow us to save some time every time we have to type a period. Instead of manually pressing the period key and the space bar to continue typing, we can do a Quick double tap on the space bar and the period and a space will appear automatically.
In case it doesn’t work, we recommend checking that the option is activated. If you are an iOS user, you can find it in Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcut “.”. If you are an Android user, you will have to go to Settings > System > Keyboard > On-screen keyboard > Gboard > Spell check > Double space inserts period.
Via | CHIP
Cover image | Xataka Mobile