This Hidden iPhone Space Bar Feature Is Blowing Everyone's Minds
Picture this: you're writing out a long text on your iPhone and notice a couple of typos in the paragraph when you're finished. What do you do? You could delete all the sentences until you get to the words or letters you want to actually delete, or you could tap the screen a bunch of times to try and select the words you need to delete. But food blogger @krissys_kitchen, aka Krissy Brierre-Davis, on Twitter recently tweeted out a third, much easier solution — you could use your iPhone's space bar feature to move your cursor and fix the typo.
If you have an iPhone 6 or later, the 3D touch feature on the spacebar lets you place your cursor within text with precision. Here's how it works — open up your iPhone and type out a couple of sentences into a text box. When you reach the end of your final sentence, tap on your spacebar and press down with additional pressure to activate 3D touch. Then, move your thumb around and watch your cursor move to the exact word or letter you need to delete. Voila!
Brierre-Davis demonstrated this on her Twitter account with a couple of screenshots to help users replicate the process:
Brierre-Davis' tweet blew up, with Twitter users responding with comments like "I was today years old when I learned this" or "bless you and your children for generations." The tweet received thousands of likes, responses, and retweets, showing that everyone on the internet was desperate for a way to edit iPhone text easily — and tremendously grateful when they got it.
The space bar trick isn't the only hidden 3D touch feature on the iPhone that will make your life easier. Want to get rid of all those notifications that pile up in the notification center? Press and hold the X button on one of the notifications until you get a message prompting you to "Clear All Notifications," saving you time clearing them all out. Want to instantly take a selfie? 3D touch the camera icon and tap the first option that appears on the drop down menu that says "Take Selfie." According to How-to Geek, you can delete text you've typed faster by 3D touching the backspace key.
The 3D touch feature I find most useful, though, is one in which you can preview a link in an article on your iPhones browser without actually opening the article. The feature is called "peek" by Apple and to use it, first tap lightly on a link in a web article to open a preview box. If the article seems to be worth the read, pressing down a little harder yet will open the entire webpage and let you interact with it like normal. This prevents me from having to open a bunch of unnecessary webpages and makes it easier to find articles I actually want to be reading.
So, while you're exploring this brand new space bar world that's been opened up for you, make sure to check out different ways 3D touch can make your life even easier. Like Brierre-Davis, you're sure to find a couple of surprises.
