The iPhone sports one of the best software keyboards in the industry, and yet creative members of the jailbreak community always seem to find ways to remind us why we should be asking so much more of Apple as the company releases annual software upgrades.
Enter SwipeExtenderX, a newly released jailbreak tweak by iOS developer qwertyuiop1379 that supercharges the iOS keyboard with up to 20 different swipe gesture-based actions to help make the process of typing on an iPhone even easier than it already is.
As depicted in the screenshot examples above, SwipeExtenderX integrates new features seamlessly into the native iOS keyboard. The tweak doesn’t work with third-party keyboards, but this isn’t much of a trade-off since you won’t really want to use any third-party keyboards after giving SwipeExtenderX a try.
With it, you can designate special keys on your iOS keyboard and configure what happens when you swipe any direction on them. The tweak current supports the following actions:
- Insert text
- Select word
- Select all
- Cut
- Copy
- Paste
- Undo
- Redo
- Delete forward
- Delete word
- Dismiss autocorrect
- Dismiss keyboard
- Open menu (shows a list of customizable actions)
- Move cursor to beginning
- Move cursor to end
- Toggle dictation
- Invoke an Activator action
- Show CopyLog (if you have this tweak)
- Insert the current date
In addition to the augmented functionality listed above, SwipeExtenderX also empowers jailbreakers with the ability to colorize their keyboard and label individual keys.
Once you’ve installed SwipeExtenderX, you’ll find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where you can configure the tweak to your liking:
Here, you can:
- Respring your device to save any changes you make
- Edit special keys
- Configure/apply presets
- Configure functionality
- Configure appearance
In the Edit special keys pane, you can enter keys that you want to double-tap to select. In presets, you can apply pre-configured settings to your keyboard.
In the Functionality pane, you can adjust the swipe threshold and glide type delay, whereas in the Appearance pane, you can hide or show key names, adjust opacity, font size, name position, character position, and colors.
From what we can tell, SwipeExtenderX provides a bevy of useful new features for the stock iOS keyboard, and if you’re one of those who think the iOS keyboard is good enough as it comes, then we can’t wait to hear what you have to say after giving this tweak a try.
For those interested, SwipeExtenderX is available from MiRO92’s repository via your preferred package manager and supports jailbroken iOS 14, 15, and 16 devices, including rootless jailbreaks.
Will you be augmenting your iPhone’s typing experience with SwipeExtenderX? Discuss why or why not in the comments section below.
