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TextExpander: Tab on iOS
29 Mar 2015Even with the advent of iOS8 and custom keyboards and customised keyboard lines in specific apps, one thing I still find myself wishing I could get on my iPhone and iPad keyboards is a tab key. Fortunately there is a nice easy way to work around this using one of my favourite iOS utilities - TextExpander Touch.
If you read this blog with any regularity you’ll be familiar with my fondness for all things TextExpander. It is incredibly versatile and a huge time saver. It can not only substitute in pieces of boiler plate text, but also handle basic formatting, images and handle more sophisticated requirements using fill-in forms and scripts.
In this particular case though the solution is simple and I’m guessing most of you will have already worked out what I’m using. Quite simply I just have a TextExpander snippet that inserts a tab character when I type in a particular bit of text.
If you have TextExpander on the Mac and are syncing your snippets library then when you try and add a tab character to your snippet content it will navigate away from the content field when you press the tab key and of course it isn’t available on an iOS keyboard. To make things a little easier (maybe?) you can copy and paste the character between the asterisks below into your snippet.
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Alternately you can download the ThoughtAsylum characters snippet group that contains this snippet (triggered by typing in ttab).
With your snippet loaded in on iOS, you can use the TextExpander keyboard in any app or any keyboard in an app that integrates with TextExpander (after refreshing your snippets for that app of course) to insert a tab character.
This snippet can be downloaded as part of the Thought Asylum symbols snippets group.
