IOS – Stopping iOS backspace deleting whole words or lines

iosiphonekeyboard

Background

Even though I have owned every iPhone from the 3G onwards I have NEVER mastered the backspace key. If you hold it to delete a few words it almost ALWAYS catches me out and starts deleting whole words and then whole lines (if you keep it pressed).
I just want it to continue deleting one letter at a time until I remove my finger. If I want to delete huge blocks I would highlight them. 🙂

Question

Is there ANY way to prevent this?
My iPhone 5 is Jailbroken so I'm sure there must be a way but no matter how much searching I do I can't for the life of me find it.

Thanks

Best Answer

SwipeSelection

While this does not 'fix' your backspace you can use the 'shift' key en swipe over the keyboard to select the text you want to delete. avoiding you to have to hold down the backspace

Check out the video in the link.

Works on iPhone and iPad.

Related Solutions

Command-backspace deletes a whole line. Is there a way to disable this

Make the contents of your ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict look like the text below

/* my keybindings */

{
"@\U007F" = "deleteWordBackward:"; /* delete backwards one word */
}

'@' represents the command key
'\U007F' represents the delete key
'deleteWordBackward' is a keyword which Cocoa applications understand

Once you restart any Cocoa app, this will now just delete one word to the left of the cursor instead of everything between the beginning of the line and the cursor.

MacOS – How to customize .inputrc to make Command-Delete and Option-Delete delete lines and words in iTerm 2

⌘← can be assigned to \eOH and ⌘→ to \eOF. You could assign ⌥← to \eb like in Terminal, but it doesn't work in vi mode or nano.

In emacs mode you could also add this to .inputrc:

"\e[1;9D": backward-word
"\e[1;9C": forward-word
"\e[3~": kill-word

C-v shows the escape sequence for the next key combination. ^[ is ESC in caret notation. bind -p prints currently bound commands.