switching open apps with a Bluetooth keyboard.

By Khomus, 8 February, 2024

Forum
Apple Hardware and Compatible Accessories

Is there no way to do this? The equivalent of a four-finger right or left swipe? I've seen references to cmd-tab but that doesn't work for me.

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Comments

By Yvonnezed on Friday, February 9, 2024 - 21:22

It should be vo-shift-left square bracket and shift right square bracket.

By Yvonnezed on Friday, February 9, 2024 - 21:22

For Voiceover at least the best thing to do is to go into commands in the VO settings and explore. Sometimes you'll have to experiment a bit to figure out what things do, and in the case of keyboards and iPhones I think some things won't work and only work on iPads, but everything's in there.

If something doesn't have a Shortcut you can create one, provided the key isn't already used, and it'll tell you. In fact I think you can do it even if it's already used, provided what it's used for is something you don't need, ☺️.

By Khomus on Friday, February 9, 2024 - 21:22

Weird that they have a shortcut for it, and it's not just cmd-tab, like Mac I believe, and iPad. Like, you have the same functionality, why not just use the same command, and one keyboard shortcut instead of two, to cycle through apps? Weirdness. I'll have to play with it and see if it will let me add that as a shortcut.

By Yvonnezed on Friday, February 9, 2024 - 21:22

Well you wouldn't be able to set it to command-tab, since it has to have the VO prefix. No idea if you could set it to vo-tab, or whether you'd want to if you could, ☺️.

I've never entirely understood why there's a difference between an iPad and an iPhone when it comes to keyboards. I mean, a bunch of apps have keyboard shortcuts that work in iPad but not iPhone. I've always figured it's just that the way pretty much all sighted users would use a bluetooth keyboard on an Iphone would be for typing only, so it's never been implemented, and there's very little demand for it.

By Khomus on Friday, February 9, 2024 - 21:22

For example, iPad OS can have multiple apps on the screen at the same time, like multiple windows essentially. So I'm guessing that's what cmd-tab does. The gestures we're talking about on the phone switch between whatever apps are in the app switcher. So the difference would be that in that case, each app is brought to the foreground when you swipe to it. To my mind, that doesn't seem like enough of a difference to matter, like I feel like that key combination could just do different things depending on whether you were on a phone or not. But Apple doesn't pay me, so there you go.