iOS 9: Use Two Fingers to Manipulate Text

Selecting text with two fingers in iOS 9

As you can see, if you’re touching the on-screen keyboard with two fingers, it’ll helpfully fade out to show you that you’re ready to do some fancy text-selection stuff.

So as I noted, this has two important functions. First, if you don’t have any text selected, it’ll let you move your cursor within your text. If text is selected, though, dragging your two fingers up and down the screen will expand and contract your selection. This is so, so much easier than trying to grab those two little blue handles to select text! I love it.

One more thing—while you’re messing around with text, check out the new little Shortcut Bar at the top of your keyboard.

iOS 9's on-screen keyboard shortcut bar

Those tools on either side—which change based on whether you have text selected—will let you cut, copy, paste, undo, stylize your text, and so on. Handy! In fact, this is so handy that it means I need an iPad Pro to replace my perfectly fine iPad Air, right? Can I get a high five? 

Anyone?

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