If you’ve ever tried to move the cursor in a text field on an Android phone, you know how frustrating it can be trying to get it exactly where you want. Gboard helps a little with its sliding feature, which lets you hold down the spacebar and then swipe left or right to adjust the position of the cursor. But this solution is not perfect either.
You can easily overshoot the mark when swiping with the spacebar, and you can’t use the gesture to move up or down through longer blocks of text. Now Google seems to be working on a new feature that could make cursor control much easier.
Android Authority, while browsing the latest beta version of the keyboard app, discovered a cursor mode in development that could make adjusting the cursor position as easy as it is on a laptop. Although the feature is not yet available in the current beta build, the publication managed to enable it early and provide a preview of how it might work post-release.
Cursor Mode would essentially turn Gboard’s keyboard area into a virtual trackpad, allowing users to drag the cursor in any direction. To activate it, users reportedly need to hold down the space bar and then move their finger or thumb across the trackpad to adjust the cursor’s position.
It is currently unclear whether the new cursor mode will replace the current sliding gesture. Because it was discovered during a teardown, Google could still tweak the UI before release or even choose not to release the feature at all. The company will likely announce more details once it’s ready to launch.
If it makes it to the stable version, the feature would be a welcome addition for anyone who spends a lot of time typing on their phone. The ability to freely move the cursor in any direction would make editing longer messages, emails or notes far less cumbersome and bring the experience closer to what you’d expect from a laptop trackpad.
