Gboard is readying an upgrade to make typing noticeably better

Gboard isn’t part of the Google Play Store’s 10 billion download club, but it’s one of the best ways to type on Android. While Gboard has something to offer everyone, for those who want to type faster, you must learn to use features like Glide cursor control to type faster with great accuracy.

The Glide cursor control capability is an interesting one. While it helps you quickly move the insertion point within the current line to quickly fix those annoying typos, its biggest drawback is that it takes a lot of time to drag it to another line using the same trick.

Google is finally working on fixing this by introducing a new cursor mode feature, as per an APK teardown of the Gboard app version 16.8.2.867538971-beta-arm64-v8a conducted by Android Authority.

Gboard’s upcoming cursor mode feature will give you a virtual trackpad

As things stand right now, the Glide cursor control feature allows you to tap the spacebar and swipe left or right to move the insertion point along the line. On top of this, users will also be able to tap and hold the spacebar to launch a virtual trackpad, replacing the keys on Gboard’s interface.

Once the virtual trackpad appears, you’ll see a virtual cursor that you can move between lines, unlike the Glide cursor control. All you have to do is drag the cursor and place it on the line that contains the typo. This will come in handy when you want to fix your mistakes in large blocks of text.

You can use the Glide cursor control functionality to move the insertion point to another line, but it’s slow since it changes lines only after reaching the end of the current one. It might not be that big of a problem when you want to move to the next line, but it becomes frustrating when you need to jump several lines up or down using this Glide cursor control.

The virtual trackpad aims to solve this problem, though it’s not new for a keyboard app on Android. For example, the SwiftKey Keyboard, one of the best keyboard apps on Android, already launches a virtual trackpad when you tap and hold the spacebar. It works the same way Google intends for the upcoming virtual trackbar to work.

However, it’s not clear whether this will replace the Glide cursor control feature, nor is there any information on when Google plans to introduce the virtual trackpad to Gboard.