That's not the full story. From iOS 12 you can do the long touch on the spacebar and get the same functionality as the 3d touch on the rest of the keyboard.
Great for me as 3d touch is so flaky on my iPhone since I got the screen replaced.
Instead you can just swipe the spacebar left or right. It works much better than the iOS 3D touch cursor movement, which seems to false-negative on my force touch very frequently (at least half the time, for me).
With older iPhones with 3D touch, there used to be a fourth way:
4. Deep press anywhere on the keyboard to switch to cursor moving mode.
On my iPhone X, I used this all the time. With the iPhone 11, there is no substitute: you cannot long press on anything but the space bar to move the cursor. Also, a deep press was quicker to activate, a long press takes a fraction of a second longer. It's a bit annoying.
Yes. It’s a long press, though, not 3D Touch or whatever they used to call it. Admittedly this got much better with the new shorter delay to activate long press in iOS 17.
It’s restricted to the space bar, too. IIRC it was much better on my old 6S.
Fully agree to that! It's the best cursor movement solution that currently exists on phones.
Since someone mentioned that iOS12 now includes a solution that works without 3D touch by long-pressing spacebar I tried that too: It's not really a replacement. Since you start touching at the lowest-end of the screen scrolling upwards is awkward. It feels less precise than the 3d touch variant, and selecting works requires another hand to tip the screen.
Going from my iPhone 8 to an Xr seems like a step back to me in this regard. And I'm not willing to invest in the Xs.
> I was happy to learn it’s still there! Now you do a long tap on the space bar to activate it.
It's not though. The feature implemented with haptic touch only lets you long press on space bar and move the cursor. You have to use a second finger to start selection and control the bounds, and it's far less accurate.
With 3D touch, you could press down once to start cursor mode, again to start selection, and again to stop. You could also reset the selection while staying in cursor mode. I was able to, quite frequently, change entire sentences and edit text really efficiently with a single hand holding the phone. That's impossible now.
I'd be really happy if Apple went back and improved the spacebar cursor system, but right now it's objectively worse as it requires two fingers rather than one to select text.
I miss the cursor magnifying glass widget and will miss using 3D touch to open the cursor when my iphone 8 eventually dies. Disappointing. That used to be one of the major things separating iOS from Android. Holding the spacebar feels nowhere as smooth.
Same here. I just learned yesterday that iOS 12 allows you to rest your finger on the space bar to begin moving the cursor like you would a mouse. Use another finger to tap the keyboard (anywhere) to start and end selection mode.
It's a lot easier than trying to precisely aim your fat meat fingers on the itty bitty text!
Selection was introduced at the same time as “space bar cursor”, which is with the introduction of 3D Touch in the iPhone 6s.
Actually, it wasn’t even a “space bar cursor”, as the way of triggering it was with force pressing and not by holding the space bar. It works much better with 3D Touch, as you can move the cursor around and press harder without lifting to start selecting, then release a bit to stop. My iPhone 8 can still do it, and I’m really going to miss it when I upgrade.
I use 3D Touch on the daily to move the cursor around when typing on my XS Max. Definitely a feature I will miss when I get a new iPhone and it will take some time to get use to
An interesting fact is that it's actually a Post 3D touch feature. It should have been possible to do it all the years. But the feature only had been introduced with iOS 12, after the first phone without 3d touch (iPhone Xr) after some years had been released.
I would have been useful for devices like the iPhone SE too.
In iOS 13 you can just drag the cursor around with no special technique or gesture. It also effectively removes the peek and pop paradigm and replaces it with context menus which work on all devices. It seems pretty clear that they’re setting up to remove 3D Touch.
Oh my god, thank you for telling me about this. I just upgrade from a 6s to a SE and I've dearly missed being able to move the cursor around with force touch (the only useful force touch feature.) Just checked and holding the spacebar works great. Thanks!
So you don't actually need 3D Touch to have the benefit of the awesome cursor UX.
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