10 Tips To Help You Type Faster On Your iPhone

It can be hard to type on an iPhone's small virtual keyboard. But with these tips and some practice you can significantly improve your typing and text editing speed.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at some tips to help you type faster on your iPhone.
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So typing on the iPhone isn't ideal. Just tapping those little keys on the screen can be much slower than using a real keyboard. But if you learn some tricks you can increase your speed. First let's look at Predictive Text. These are the three words that appear above the keyboard as you type. Now when you start using this it doesn't necessarily make you any faster but if you practice you can definitely increase your speed over time. This is true for just about everything I have to show you. You have to kind of dedicate yourself to learning and using that tool and then over time your speed will slowly increase as you use it more.
As I type here and I tap out the letters you can notice that it gives me suggestions at the top. So I start typing the word quick and you can see eventually it gets what I want to type. So instead of having to type two more letters and then the space I could just tap that word there. It'll type it out, put a space and I'm ready for the next word. It will even try to predict what the next word will be based on the context. So sometimes I can skip typing entirely and just tap the word. If you don't see these three words there you may have turned it off in Settings. A lot of things I'm going to show you can be turned On and Off in Settings. 
A quick way to get to Keyboard Settings from the keyboard is to tap and hold at the bottom left corner and then go to Keyboard Settings. Then here you could see a lot of those. So if I scroll down here I could see Predictive and you could see I have it turned On. 
A much faster way to type is to use Slide to Type. This allows you to instead of tapping each letter individually you can tap the first letter. Keep your finger pressed down and slide around on the keyboard to the other letters. You don't have to hit them each perfectly. It's going to try to figure out what you mean. So I'll do this for the next word here and you could see it was a much faster action than actually tapping each letter out. Every time I do this it's going to insert the space automatically. (Demonstrating).
In order for this to work you really have to dedicate yourself to doing it. Start doing it and force yourself to use it each time. Then it kind of becomes natural and then you'll find that you could type way faster than you can by tapping out each letter.
Now let's say you want to type a key that isn't on the current keyboard. You have to hit Shift to get a capital letter or you have to hit the 123 key at the bottom left to get that. The natural way to handle that, you would think, is to tap that number key, find what you want like say a number, tap that, and then tap the abc key to go back to letters. However you can do that in one motion. If you tap and hold, drag your finger up to the key that you want, release, and it will automatically switch back to the previous keyboard mode. You can use this for almost anything. So I can do it for Shift, for instance. I can tap, drag, and then release over that key and you can see I tapped a capital letter in one motion.
Now sometimes you need to type an accent mark or alternative character and you can do that in a similar way that you type on a Mac where you would press the key and hold it to see alternatives. So if I want to type the letter e with an accent mark I could tap and hold e, wait for those alternatives to appear, slide my finger over to the one I want and release to get that letter with the accent mark. But it also works for alternatives. So, for instance, if I tap the 123 key there I can see the dash key on the left. There are various sizes to dashes. If I tap and hold I can see them all.
Now part of typing is correcting mistakes. The biggest way to correct a mistake is to use Undo. In iOS 13 there's a really simple way to use Undo. For instance if I want to undo this word here I could just take three fingers and swipe to the left and it will undo and show you at the top. Three finger swipe to the right will Redo. You can also use three fingers to Undo, Redo, or Copy and Paste. Just tap in the middle of the screen with three fingers and you get controls at the top. They are Undo at the left and Redo at the right. In the middle you have Cut, Copy, and Paste.
While working with text you may want to go back and insert some text or work with some text in the middle. One way to do that is to kind of tap where you want the cursor to go. But sometimes that can be a little difficult especially if the text is smaller and you have lots of it. You can tap and hold the spacebar on the keyboard and it turns, basically, the keyboard into a trackpad. Now I can drag my finger around and position the cursor exactly where I want. 
Now a great way to type quickly is not to type at all. You can setup text replacements for things and substitute a few characters for a lot of characters. Let's go into Settings here. I'm going to tap at the bottom left. Go to Keyboard Settings and then at the top here I'm going to tap on Text Replacement. Here's where I can add a new text replacement. So at the top type the entire phrase and you could use something as long as you want. So something like this. Then you just have to have a shortcut. So let's just do something like xsup for support there but it's not a real word so we never need to actually type this. Now I'll hit Save. Now let's go back to Notes. If I type that and then just hit space you could see it inserts the entire thing. Actually notice that the predictive text even had it there at the top and I could have just tapped it. So you could have little common phrases or things you need or maybe a long email address that's difficult to type or a whole set of paragraphs of different things that you want to insert very easily.
Now what happens if you're holding your phone with one hand and you're trying to type with your thumb. Well there's a mode for the keyboard that makes it a little easier to type. If I tap and hold down there at the bottom I could choose to move the keyboard over to the left or the right. So let's try the left here. You could see it condenses the keyboard and makes it a little bit easier for me to reach all the keys with my thumb. To turn it off I could either tap in that area over the right or just repeat the same thing and select the regular keyboard. 
Now of course another way to type without typing is to use Dictation. There is a built-in Dictation function. You see it at the bottom right hand corner of your keyboard. It's great for basically typing one sentence at a time by talking. Lazy dog period. Just tap the keyboard there at the bottom to go back into regular typing mode. There is no reason you can't combine these. So you could be typing things out and then maybe tap the microphone, speak out a few things, and then go back to regular typing. Use the spacebar as a trackpad to go back and quickly correct something.
If you're sitting down at a desk or something and you want to type on your iPhone faster nothing beats using a regular keyboard. There's no reason you can't use just about any bluetooth keyboard to quickly type on your iPhone. You can pair a keyboard just like any other bluetooth device. In Settings go to Bluetooth and you should see it appear there. Follow the instructions for your keyboard to put it into pairing mode. Then I could select it. Once it's paired up I can then use this keyboard to type very easily. You can also do a lot of the things you're used to doing on a Mac keyboard. So, for instance, I could use Shift and left arrow to select something. I could do Command C to Copy. I can use the arrows to move around. I could do Command V to Paste. That kind of thing.
So here's some quick bonus tips! You don't need to type the period at the end of a sentence. You could just type the spacebar twice. So, for instance, at the end of the sentence here I could just type spacebar twice and it inserts the period and the space. If you want the Caps Lock to stay on all you need to do is double tap the Shift key at the bottom left and you could see now it says Caps Lock. So now I could type something LOUD and then just type the Shift key once to turn it off. 
If you're in a situation where you're typing a webpage address you could tap and hold the period key and get common domain name endings like .com and just release to type that. You could always go and get a third party keyboard that helps you with typing in some way. There are a variety of different companies that provide third party keyboards. You can see here if I tap the bottom left I could go to Keyboard Settings. Here I've got Keyboards 2. Tap that and you could see I've just got the two standard keyboards. If I tap Add New Keyboard you could see it recognizes that I have an app that has a keyboard extension. That's the Goggle app. It has Gboard as a keyboard there. So now I could switch to using Goggle's special keyboard just by tapping here. You could see I could switch to the Goggle keyboard and now I get a different looking keyboard with different functionality. If you search the App Store for third party keyboards you'll find a variety of different apps that provide these special keyboards. So you may find something that you like if you look around and try some.
So I hope these tips help you type a little bit faster on your iPhone. The important thing is to pick something like Predictive Text or Slide to Type and practice it. Keep using it. You may not see improvement in speed right away but you'll start to gradually see it over the course of days as you get better and better at using that technique.

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Tips To Help You Type Faster On Your iPhone”

Gene

4 years ago

I assume that you recommend typing with one's thumbs? I would think "swipe to type" would be easier with a finger since it was more dexterity? This was a fantastic video.

Gary Rosenzweig

Gene: I don't recommend any over the other as people prefer different things. I find I type fastest with swiping, but I often just tap out each key if the message is short or I am holding the phone with one hand. But you may find something else works better for you.

Is there something I need to do with my keyboard to get my iPhone X to "see" it? It is a wireless keyboard on my iMac running Catalina 10.15.6

Jane Mountain

Swipe works really well. What do you suggest when you have a double letter in swiping? I think the keyboard figures it out if I pause on the key a bit. Also can I use the keyboard from my MacBook Pro to text on my phone? Thanks for all your videos. They help me improve my skills greatly and this has been especially helpful for my work.

Gene: Do you mean a physical keyboard? You need to connect it via Bluetooth. Of course doing so will disconnect it from your iMac.

Jane: Just move over the letter like there is one. You iPhone is using algorithms to figure it out. It knows that typing "Aple" makes no sense, so it out "Apple." You can't use your MacBook Pro's built-in keyboard. But you can use a Bluetooth or USB keyboard.

Robert

Hi Gary!
When I try to hold the period on my iPhone X (up to date), it only shows the period and three dots to choose from. No choice of .com or others.
Robert

Robert: It is contextual. Are you typing in a field that is looking for a URL? It won't appear if you are just typing in notes or a document of some sort.

Norm Bradley

It’s the little things that mean a lot. Thanks

Comments Closed.

10 Tips To Help You Type Faster On Your iPhone

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Tips To Help You Type Faster On Your iPhone”

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