By Dan Moren
September 19, 2018 6:05 AM PT
Quick Tip: Typing a Tab character in iOS
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
While I was playing around with Shortcuts the other night, I ran into a dilemma. The “Combine Text” action offers the ability to output text separated by a custom delimiter, and I wanted to use a tab character.1
However, as you eagle-eyed readers surely know, the iOS keyboard lacks a Tab key. Searching around for an alternative, I came across a few suggestions, including copying and pasting a tab character from another app, but one that I uncovered on a message board was particularly simple: use Dictation.
That’s right, if you tap that microphone icon on the keyboard and say “Tab key,” iOS will insert a tab for you. That’ll work pretty much anywhere you can use Dictation, including in Shortcuts. So I was able to output tab-delimited data into a file for future reference.
Dumb? A little. Useful? For sure.
Update: A suggestion from reader FJ: you can also create a text shortcut on the Mac that contains a tab, though you have to put in another character as well; this shortcut will then sync to your iOS devices. A little more cumbersome, but nice if you’re in a place where you can’t use Dictation.
- The workflow I was creating has the goal of ultimately outputting data that could be easily pasted into a Numbers spreadsheet. Though, as it turns out, that’s a bit stickier on iOS. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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