How do I to move my cursor backwards on my iphone?

Hey wuddog,

There is a way to get to the beginning of the text without deletion (if the text exceeds the viewable portion of the text field or box)....

All you have to do is......long press any letter on the keyboard (at this time all the keys on your keyboard will turn grey).....then without letting go move the cursor to the front of the text box....Try this...it worked for me...

Kittyroo wrote:

Hey wuddog,

There is a way to get to the beginning of the text without deletion (if the text exceeds the viewable portion of the text field or box)....

All you have to do is......long press any letter on the keyboard (at this time all the keys on your keyboard will turn grey).....then without letting go move the cursor to the front of the text box....Try this...it worked for me...

That was not an option three years ago when the person to whom you're replying posted.

But it's still pretty cool now.

You can still use the magnifying glass. Put your finger on the text that you can see to bring up the magnifying glass then slide your finger to where you the text you need to edit is located. In every app I've used, the screen will move. What app are you having a problem with?

Yup, sometimes it is just a pain to edit text on iOS.

The only way I have found to get around it is to use an external bluetooth keyboard (the arrow keys work) or to copy and paste into another app to clean up the text where it can be inserted a few line down.

Meg St._Clair, Safari URL's (& other browsers) are one of the worst things to try to select and edit.

There may be a third party keyboard for iOS 8 that does it by now, the only one I have seen that comes close is this…

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/10/07/ikeywi-brings-awesome-jailbreak-keyboard -features-to-ios-8-video/

Drew Reece wrote:

Meg St._Clair, Safari URL's (& other browsers) are one of the worst things to try to select and edit.

I think it's more practice than anything else. It's annoying at the beginning but once you do it a few (hundred 😉) times, it's really not that hard. I can't say I think much about it any more. Even when I use a BT keyboard, I generally position the insertion point for editing with my finger. It's just faster.

I just found the most amazing thing on my iPad. If the text exceeds the text field move the magnifying glass to the left side of the search field and the text will move to the right making deleting uneccessary.

Sorry to hear that and thanks for the clarification. Maybe you could leave Apple a note at the link below suggesting they add the feature to the iPhone.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Yes, I know exactly what you are talking about, and there does appear to be a bug. On my 4S, there was never a problem moving the magnifying glass back to the beginning when inside the Google search box. Now, you just slide it to the beginning of what's showing in the text box and it stops. There's no way to move it further. This is very annoying and another in the long list of bugs in iOS 8.XX.

For reference, this device is iPhone 6 w/ iOS 8.1.

radiolarian wrote:

Yes, I know exactly what you are talking about, and there does appear to be a bug. On my 4S, there was never a problem moving the magnifying glass back to the beginning when inside the Google search box. Now, you just slide it to the beginning of what's showing in the text box and it stops. There's no way to move it further. This is very annoying and another in the long list of bugs in iOS 8.XX.

For reference, this device is iPhone 6 w/ iOS 8.1.

What text field are you seeing it? In the URL bar to or the search field on the page? Sometimes it seems to be the fault of the text field styling.

I don't seem to have trouble with this on iOS 8.3 on an iPhone 5 perhaps you want to update to 8.4? If it seems like a bug submit it to Apple…

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Or try a genius at an Applestore if you want to have it checked out.

Long press on the keyboard (and hard) and the cursor will be able to move