So ever since iOS 12 (or 13?) I’ve come to actually use trackpad mode a lot on my iPhone for cursor placement. Especially since they removed the little magnifying glass view making it harder to see what’s going on where your finger is.
The one thing I cannot figure out is how to use it to move the cursor further down the page. Since you invoke trackpad mode with a long press on space bar, you’re already pretty much at the bottom of the screen so you can hardly move further down. And swiping over the bottom edge of the screen just dumps you out of trackpad mode. Have any of you figured out a good way to get around this?
I hadn’t been aware of this but confimerd it is as you stated
As soon as I had dragged the ccursor to the bottom of the edit window I was brought back to the underlying window
No solution but it inadicates to put the windwo where your starting point is at the top of hte window
I don’t know why you would be trying to position the cursor beyond the initial display area. There are better ways to grab segment for copy, delete etc
I always thought of this as a great way to have more precision for the initial placement of the cursor
No, I don’t know of a good workaround for this. Sometimes you can get the cursor at the end of the screen and it will scroll the screen as you pull down, but I can’t make that happen reproducibly.
If you had Voice Control on, you could say “scroll down” or “move to end.” Those works nicely and are an example of why it would be nice to have voice control integrated better.
@Simon, I don’t know if something has changed here, but I just stumbled across this thread and tried again and decided to play. I discovered a few things:
Although you can use trackpad mode with your right thumb and scroll separately with your left thumb, that merely moves the viewport and doesn’t take the insertion point along with it.
You can enter trackpad mode, swipe up above the keyboard while remaining in trackpad mode, and then swipe down to just below the space bar to get a little scrolling. This seems more effective than it actually is, though, and I wasn’t able to get the insertion point to show up much below the text that was hidden under the keyboard.
Direct manipulation, where you touch and hold in the text to move the insertion point, does reveal the magnifying glass now, though it disappears if you move to the top or bottom of the screen to scroll. But this is the way to scroll around in a long document and position the insertion point.
Yeah, this has always remained semi-useful to me. For the aforementioned reason.
What’s annoying to me is that the fix appears to be so trivial. If in trackpad mode I drag my finger to the top of the trackpad area, the screen will scroll and the cursor just keeps going farther up. But no matter what I do at the bottom of the trackpad area, there is no scrolling down. If Apple just added the functionality that pushing your finger to the bottom edge of the trackpad area invoked the same scrolling behavior as when you reach the top edge, this would easily be resolved once and for all.