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That was originally a Gboard feature but it's great, so every decent keyboard supports it now.
One thing I really like about the iOS keyboard is that doing that can move the cursor in all directions. On Android keyboards, dragging the spacebar can only move it left/right.
Agreed, there's enough room to go two lines down and many up. Android can already go up/down without issues if you have a keyboard with arrow keys, so keyboards would just need to implement the gesture.
IOS also has contextual tab buttons that are very nice. I wish other companies would copy the things apple does well instead of the bullshit they actually copy.
IIRC only iOS has that because apple holds a patent on that specific implementation. Which sucks because on Gboard the space bar can be quite small and the timing between activating the cursor scroll and opening the language menu seems like 0.15 seconds
@[email protected] SwiftKey on Android also supports moving the cursor in all directions.
But GBoard has change language as spacebar hold action by default? That said, swiping lacks a lot of control compared to buttons. While I can’t test this specifically, I know that from highlighting text.
It has both by default. If you hold, you get the language selector but if you swipe, it moves the cursor. Gboard also has some acceleration on the swipes which makes them wildly imprecise, now I use florisboard which doesn't do that.
Oh wow, now I’m getting it. That’s actually not even that bad :D
I'm not sure what the defaults are on Gboard because I've tinkered with the settings a lot by now, but you can have both long press to change language and swipe to move cursor at the same time, they don't really interfere with each other, I just did both while writing this comment.
Also I'm not sure how many people have more than one language enabled on their keyboard, I'm admittedly not in a great position to judge that as an American since not too many of us speak more than one language with any regularity or fluency. A lot of people don't tinker with the settings too much and for a lot of languages that use some variant of the Latin alphabet using the keyboard of your main language is probably sufficient for most other Latin alphabet languages in like 99% of cases. I suspect a lot of people don't bother (though I'm happy to be proven wrong)
The alphabet in my case is the same, but swiping needs to know what language I’m using, or it will get the prediction wrong.
That said, I simply did not understand how it works and the longpress does not interfere.
Wait, what? How did I not know this? That's great!