You’ve probably spent days of your life tapping away at the iPhone keyboard – but do you know all of its secrets?
There are lots of hidden characters that you can unlock on the iPhone keyboard if you know how.
There are some obvious ones to start with.
If you tap the 123 in the bottom left corner, and then tap the symbol button above ABC, you are presented with more icons.
But more exciting is what happens when you hold your finger down on a key.
This brings up new options for you to type, as recently revealed by TikTok creator HeimaDigital.
Many standard English alphabet letters will have variants that you can access this way.
For instance, press and hold on the letter A and you can add accents, tildes and umlauts.
But you unlock even more strange characters if you try the technique on symbols in the iPhone keyboard.
Hold on a hyphen to unlock the longer (and longer still!) en-dash and em-dash.
And holding on a full stop will present you with an ellipsis.
Holding down on common symbols like the comma, quotation marks and question mark will prompt new symbols.
You can also unlock the degree symbol (for angles and temperatures) by holding down on the number zero.
There are some other typing tricks you should learn…
Take the ‘QuickPath’
Apple’s ‘swipe to text’ feature has been available since iOS 13 came out.
However, many people still don’t realize it exists.
Dubbed QuickPath, the tool lets you swipe between letters rather than tap them to turn you into a writing machine.
To use it, make sure you’re using iOS 13 or above and then just go to your Messages app and start swiping between letters on the keyboard.
Make sure you’re using Apple’s default keyboard rather than a third-party one you’ve downloaded yourself.
When you start typing a word, leave your finger on the keyboard and swipe between letters.
So, if you were typing “Sun”, you’d place your finger on “S”, then slide to “U” and finally “N” without removing your finger.
Once you’ve finished the word, lift your digit and iOS will automatically add a space so you can start typing the next word.
For words with two letters in a row, such as “happy”, you don’t need to swipe to the “P” twice.
Simply move from “P” to “Y” and the keyboard should detect you want an extra letter.
Add punctuation faster
Tapping out full stops might not seem like a burden, but it does slow you down.
That’s why Apple has built a cheeky shortcut into iOS to make it even easier to end a sentence.
If you tap the space bar twice after a word, the first space will convert into a full stop.
That way you can keep typing using only letters and the space bar, without ever having to reach down for the full stop.
This story originally appeared on The Sun and has been reproduced here with permission.