You’re probably familiar with swipe typing on your phone, but did you know you can have the same convenience on your iPad?

This feature has existed in iPadOS for years, but it’s not something Apple has made available on the full size iPad keyboard.

iPadOS lets you resize the keyboard into a floating, phone-sized version that supports swiping to type, just like your phone. (Its probably worth calling out that Apple officially refers to swipe typing as “QuickPath” in their documentation).

There are two ways to get the smaller keyboard:

• Tap and hold the “hide keyboard” button on the bottom right corner of the keyboard. You’ll see a popup that gives you a “floating” option that will shrink the keyboard. Tapping and holding the three dots at the bottom of the keyboard will give you the option to restore the keyboard to full size.

• You can pinch in on the keyboard to convert it to floating keyboard mode. Pinching out restores it to full size.

The pinch method is a little sad for me, because when it was first introduced in iPadOS 13, the animation was very smooth. At some point in the past few years, it’s gotten incredibly jerky and janky, to the point that I don’t even bother to using this method anymore 😕.

Once you have the keyboard in floating mode, you can move it around by dragging it by the three dots (which are something of a grab handle) at the bottom.

You can then swipe type on the keyboard just like you would on your phone.

The floating keyboard by itself is really useful for one-thumb typing, regardless of whether you use the swipe feature. It’s also a great option in general because it takes up less of the screen than the full-sized keyboard does, giving you more room for your content.

The one downside you’ll notice from time to time is some jankiness around text fields. Most apps (even some Apple apps) are built assuming a fixed-position virtual keyboard. Once the keyboard is floating, you may notice text fields jump around a bit as you move the keyboard.

Bonus: iPhone apps you’re using with the Windowed Apps multitasking mode have their own built-in iPhone keyboard. You can swipe type here too 🙂.