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Comment by throwaway287391 | Hacker News Reader

I hate that editing URLs is practically impossible in Chrome on iOS (not sure about Android or other iOS browsers). There seems to be no equivalent of arrow keys to navigate around inside the address bar. If I screeenmash enough I think I can sometimes get it to go to the very start or end of the URL, but anything in between is hopeless.

(Posting this partially in hopes that someone tells me how to do it to prove me wrong...)

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Are there ways to get the keyboard to have cursor keys, or something similar?

I use the Microsoft Swiftkey keyboard on Android, and there's a setting which makes holding the space button activate gestures for up/down/left/right. (i.e. hold space and move small amounts left/right.)

If you have enough screen space, I think you can add real arrow keys.

But I'm not sure you can change the keyboard on iOS.

Wow -- life-changing, thanks! On the native iOS keyboard, hold down spacebar and (without lifting your thumb) swipe left/right to "scroll around" within a text field (at least in the Chrome address bar, but presumably anywhere). Amazing that after 5+ years using iOS I'm still discovering these hidden but basic features...

I've been using SwiftKey on iOS for about half a decade, I think.

The native iOS keyboard also lets you move the cursor by long-pressing / 3d-pressing anywhere on the keyboard and then swiping slowly in any direction

It's definitely got worse (on Android) because pressing the address bar now deletes the URL and you need to press the separate edit icon to get it back and modify it. Used to just put you straight into editing mode. But you can still touch to position the cursor, backspace to delete, etc. You can scroll the URL, too.

I think if you swipe the spacebar it moves the caret

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