iOS text cursor swipe

While I was writing my review of ADN clients, I wondered aloud if Riposte or Felix or some other app entirely was the first to support swiping to move the text cursor. It seems a nice enough trick that someone should get credit for trying it first.

Here’s my brief description of how this gesture works from the Felix part of the blog post:

“Felix also added a clever trick in its post composition window. You can swipe the text view to move the selection cursor one character over, or use two fingers to swipe across an entire word at a time. This saves a lot of time tapping-and-holding and fiddling with the magnifying glass.”

It turns out that many apps support it: Diet Coda, Pages, Just Type, and TextCrafter are some that people mentioned. There are also hacks from the jailbreak community to make it work system wide.

And farther back, there’s the fantastic YouTube concept video of what text selection using drags on the keyboard might look like. I’d still love to see that implemented by Apple.

Manton Reece @manton