Uncover iOS's Hidden Speed-Typing Features

The productivity-boosting tricks concealed under your keyboard

- Christopher Phin

You might think that to get any serious typing done on an iPhone or iPad you need to use an external keyboard. While it’s true that you can do that – over Bluetooth, using a Smart Keyboard, or using Apple’s Lightning to USB adapter – if you learn the little tips and tricks Apple has baked into the on-screen keyboard, everything from a tweet to the next great novel is well within the reach of your fingertips. Let’s get typing!

We’ll start with something fundamental. Most people will only really use one keyboard for typing, but you can set up several. One main use for this is for typing in different languages; adding other keyboards in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards doesn’t just change the layout of the keys to match conventions in that country (AZERTY rather than QWERTY in France, for example), or even the input method entirely, but it changes the autocorrect dictionary, too. (Here’s a really hidden feature: you can override the keyboard layout change – to retain the benefits of the autocorrect change without the confusion of letters moving around – by tapping the name of the keyboard you’ve added in this list.)

If you do type in more than one language, therefore, and have been cursing autocorrect for mangling your words, here’s the solution, and it even works for different versions of English; handy if you sometimes need to ‘humor’ our ‘neighbors’ in America without causing ‘offense’.

1 To switch between the keyboards you add (in the order you set them in Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards), tap the globe icon at the bottom left of the keyboard. If you only have one main keyboard installed, this will instead be a smiley face, as it toggles to the emoji keyboard.

Emoji and special characters