Your iPhone Spacebar Has A Secret Superpower

I’m sure you’ve experienced the same frustration first hand. You’ve just written a nice long text, a modern-day mini-essay of sorts, but there are one or two typos that you chose to ignore as you furiously tip-tapped away.

Now, having finally taken a breath, it’s time to go back to those typos and fix them. Maybe it’s misplaced punctuation or an extra letter. Or maybe autocorrect just failed to do its job and you’re left with “duck” when you really meant… well, you know.

In any event, today I wanted to share a quick trick that’s been hiding right in front of you this whole time. (Shoutout to my boss Dan Kozikowski for suggesting I write about this today after my post about the Significant Locations list sort of took off the other day.)

Let us all now focus our attention on the spacebar on the iPhone keyboard.

Oft’ ignored, this button—the largest on the entire QWERTY keyboard, has a secret, super helpful superpower that’ll make your life quite a bit easier when you’re trying to edit those long texts in the future.

As a quick note before I share the trick: this isn’t some groundbreaking, earth-shattering, David-Attenborough-narrated moment, so if you’re here for one of those, I can save you a few more seconds of reading. This trick, while useful, probably is one you already know about if you consider yourself super tech-savvy.

Sorry ‘bout that.

Oh, you’re still here?

Then let’s proceed. Actually, why don’t I just show you instead. Below, I’ve recorded the trick in action.

Did you catch that?

Pay attention to how pressing and holding the spacebar unlocks the ability to zoom about across the text and when you release the spacebar, the cursor falls into your desired place.

The alternative, using the magnifying glass to drag and drop your cursor has never quite felt right and always takes me longer than I’d like it to in order to find the perfect cursor location.

Anyways, hopefully for some of you this was a new trick that you hadn’t previously known about. For those who already knew, well, here are three fun facts so you still walk away having learned something:

Tsundoku is the act of acquiring books and not reading them.An estimated 1 million dogs in the U.S. have been named primary beneficiary in their owners’ wills.Neil Armstrong’s astronaut application arrived a week past the deadline. A friend slipped the tardy form in with the others.Have a great night and I’ll see you tomorrow.