I had an iPad for a few months a couple of years ago, and got rid of it mostly because of the experience of editing text with a hardware keyboard - navigating and selecting text in long documents was simply a horrendous experience. My recollection is that navigating or selecting by paragraph simply didn't work, and navigating by line wasn't much better due to the inconsistent placement of the VoiceOver focus as you moved between lines.
However, I find myself tempted to give the iPad another chance. What would probably tip me over the edge, would be news that editing text with a hardware keyboard has improved during my time away.
So, it would be great to hear the experiences of those of you who do regularly use a hardware keyboard with your iPad. Are you able to reliably navigate and select text when editing long documents in apps such as Drafts, IA Writer, and 1Writer?
Comments
I believe
I believe it's California.
(sorry -- couldn't resist - smile)
My iPad Pro is my daily…
My iPad Pro is my daily driver. I use a hardware keyboard and a braille display. So I have speech, braille and physical keyboard to do work. I am a translator and proofreader, so you expect lots of writing. For navigating and selecting paragraphs, it still horrendous, one app that is great with navigating by paragraphs and selecting them is Scrivener, you can use shift+Option+up/down arrows to select paragraphs and Option+Up/Down Arrows for paragraph navigation. Navigating by line is perfect, there was issue where the content of a previous line is confused with the content in the next line, it is fixed now. VO is greatly better now with Pages, even comments are announced as highlighted text and you can navigate and read them with rotor action item.
Generally, if you like the portability and versatility of the iPad you will find solution to any problem you encounter. I found that iPadOS does not suffer from some serious bugs found on my iPhone like that of the ShareSheet.
DId I mention that Braille is not that great on iPadOS? It does the job though, but it is not even near to braille experience on Windows.
More Keystrokes
IOS 15 has brought loads of keystrokes, including for the split screen and such. There is also a quick note feature to jot anything at any time.
works for me
I, too, have an external keyboard and braille display connected to my iPad. I can navigate by character, word, sentence, line, and paragraph in pages and word using your normal keyboard commands. Option + arrows takes me to beginning or end of paragraph. If I want to select large chunks of text, I will choose either line or page in the rotor settings and flick right until I see all my text selected on my display. Selecting by line, word, and character works as expected. Please note that I splurged on the magic keyboard because I hope that one day Apple brings trackpad support to iPad and I can use it to do some quick and dirty work with Aira via Zoom. Some third party keyboards, like the popular Bridge keyboards, might not allow you to use the dedicated siri button as a function key so keep that in mind.
list of new iPad keyboard commands in IOS 15
Hello,
I, too am using an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard. Where can I find a list of the new keyboard commands added in IOS 15?