Text editing & cursor tools
A cursor pad, selection helpers, and undo/redo: precision editing from the keyboard.
Fixing a typo three lines up, selecting a whole paragraph, or nudging the cursor one character at a time is fiddly on a touchscreen with no physical arrow keys. WM Keyboard adds a dedicated text-editing panel, a set of one-tap cursor tools for the toolbar, and one-tap undo/redo, all standing in for the arrow keys and Ctrl-shortcuts a hardware keyboard would give you.
Moving and selecting text
Section titled “Moving and selecting text”Open Text editing from the toolbar, or from the toolbox if you haven’t pinned it there (see the toolbar for pinning and the toolbox in general). On a hardware keyboard, use the leader key: double-tap Ctrl, then press X.
The panel is a d-pad cluster: ◀ and ▶ span the full height on either side, with ▲, a Select toggle, and ▼ stacked in the middle. A bottom row adds Home, End, and Backspace. Every arrow key, Home, End, and Backspace is sent to the field as a real key event (the same event a hardware arrow key would send) rather than computed by the keyboard itself, so cursor movement behaves exactly the way it would with a physical keyboard plugged in.
Tap Select to turn selection mode on; the key lights up while it’s active. With Select on, every arrow, Home, or End move extends the selection instead of just moving the caret. The panel wraps each move in a real Shift press rather than a background modifier flag, since some editors only pick up Shift state from the key events themselves. Tap Select again to turn it off, or see below for the two actions that flip it automatically.
Holding ◀, ▶, ▲, ▼, or Backspace auto-repeats after a fixed 400 ms delay, then keeps repeating at an interval you can tune (see Options below).
Copying, pasting, and cutting
Section titled “Copying, pasting, and cutting”The panel’s second column holds Select all, Copy, and Paste. There’s no Cut button in the panel: cutting lives elsewhere, as a long-press letter shortcut (see below).
- Select all selects the whole field and turns selection mode on, so a follow-up arrow key shrinks the selection from whichever end you move.
- Copy copies the current selection and turns selection mode back off.
- Paste inserts the clipboard content at the cursor (replacing any selection) and doesn’t touch selection mode either way.
Copy and paste run through the target field’s own copy/paste handling (the same as if you’d triggered them from that app’s own text-selection menu), so behavior (what exactly gets copied, whether a “Copied” system toast appears) follows the app you’re typing into. WM Keyboard can add its own “Copied” confirmation on top, off by default, under WM KeyboardToolsClipboardHistory (see Clipboard manager).
Pasting into a password field clears the system clipboard afterward by default, so a copied password doesn’t linger (also configured on the Clipboard manager page, not here).
One-tap cursor tools for the toolbar
Section titled “One-tap cursor tools for the toolbar”The panel above costs one tap to open and another to act. If you reach for the same cursor move often, pin its toolbar tool instead and skip the panel entirely. They call the same underlying handler, so behavior is identical either way.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Cursor left / Cursor right | Move the cursor one character |
| Word left / Word right | Jump a whole word (Ctrl+Arrow) |
| Cursor up / Cursor down | Move the cursor a line |
| Line start / Line end | Jump to the start or end of the line |
| Page up / Page down | Scroll the cursor a page |
| Select word | Select the word at the cursor |
| Select line | Select the entire line at the cursor |
Select word and Select line aren’t Ctrl+Shift+Arrow shortcuts: the keyboard works out the word or line boundaries around the cursor itself and sets the selection directly. Both turn selection mode on afterward, and both do nothing if the cursor sits on whitespace or punctuation with no word to grab, or on an empty line.
A Hide keyboard tool sits in the toolbox right beside these (one tap dismisses the keyboard), but it’s grouped with the cursor tools rather than being one itself.
None of these tools, or Text editing itself, are pinned to the toolbar out of the box: the default pinned row is just Emoji, Clipboard, and Settings, with everything else waiting in the toolbox. If you picked “Recommended” during onboarding rather than “Everything,” note that the recommended set includes Text editing, Undo, and Redo, but leaves the numpad, Hide keyboard, and every cursor tool above out. Head to WM KeyboardTools to turn them back on if you don’t see them.
Undo and redo
Section titled “Undo and redo”The toolbar’s Undo and Redo tools fire immediately, with no panel: one tap sends the field’s own undo or redo keyboard shortcut. Undo always sends Ctrl+Z. Redo sends Ctrl+Shift+Z by default, or Ctrl+Y if you flip the redo shortcut setting.
This isn’t a typing history WM Keyboard keeps of its own. It has no way to reach into another app’s private undo stack. It sends the same shortcut a hardware keyboard would, and relies entirely on the app you’re typing in supporting it: an editor with no undo shortcut just ignores the tap.
The numeric keypad
Section titled “The numeric keypad”Numpad opens a dedicated 4×4 number pad over whatever field you’re in (not to be confused with the keyboard automatically switching to a numeric layout in a field that’s already typed as a phone or number field). That auto-switch happens on its own in the right field type; Numpad is a panel you open by hand, and works over any field, numeric or not.
It comes in two layouts, switched under Options:
- Phone-style (default):
1 2 3 ⌫/4 5 6 +/7 8 9 −/. 0 , ⏎ - Calculator-style:
7 8 9 ⌫/4 5 6 +/1 2 3 −/. 0 , ⏎
Backspace repeats on hold like the rest of the keyboard, and Enter sends a normal Enter key.
The quick alternative: spacebar cursor swipe
Section titled “The quick alternative: spacebar cursor swipe”You don’t have to open a panel at all for the most common move: sliding the cursor a short distance. By default, a long swipe on the spacebar moves the cursor (a short swipe switches language instead), and there’s an optional 2-D touchpad mode that adds vertical line movement to the same gesture. Full mechanics, including how to reassign what each swipe length does, live on Gestures.
Options
Section titled “Options”Text-edit panel repeat speed
Section titled “Text-edit panel repeat speed”Key repeat interval — default 60 ms, adjustable from 30–200 ms. Sets the pause between repeats while holding an arrow key or Backspace in the panel; lower is faster. The initial 400 ms delay before repeating starts isn’t adjustable.
Numpad layout
Section titled “Numpad layout”Calculator-style layout — off by default. Puts 7 8 9 on the top row like a desk keypad instead of 1 2 3 like a dialer.
Undo/redo shortcut
Section titled “Undo/redo shortcut”Redo sends Ctrl+Y — off by default, so Redo sends Ctrl+Shift+Z. The same toggle appears on both the Undo and Redo tool’s own settings screen. Both are standard redo shortcuts; which one an app responds to varies, so if redo does nothing, try flipping this.
Long-press letter shortcuts
Section titled “Long-press letter shortcuts”Six shortcuts, each off by default, each replacing that letter key’s accent popup while it’s on:
- Hold A to select all
- Hold C to copy — copies the current selection, or selects everything first if nothing is selected
- Hold X to cut — same rule as copy, but cuts
- Hold V to paste — pastes the clipboard at the cursor, replacing any selection
- Hold Z to undo — same shortcut as the toolbar’s Undo tool
- Hold Y to redo — same shortcut as the toolbar’s Redo tool
This is the only place cut lives: there’s no Cut button in the text-editing panel itself, and no Cut toolbar tool.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- Two Typing-screen toggles change what Select mode does elsewhere on the keyboard, even though they’re not on this page’s own settings screens: typing a bracket or quote with text selected wraps the selection in the pair instead of replacing it (on by default), and tapping Shift with text selected cycles its case instead of arming Shift for the next letter (also on by default, and a no-op in caseless scripts like Bengali). Both live under WM KeyboardTypingAutomatic corrections.
- Every tool on this page works before you’ve unlocked your device for the first time after a restart (direct boot): the panel, the cursor tools, undo/redo, and the numpad all only touch the input connection, not stored data, so none of them wait on your device being unlocked. Compare Media controls, which can’t.
- Nothing here is edition-gated. The panel, every cursor tool, undo/redo, and the numpad all work identically on the full and lite builds.
- The hardware leader key reaches Text editing (X) and Numpad (N) as panels, and fires Undo (Z) directly; there’s no leader-key letter for Redo or for any individual cursor tool.
- All copy and paste actions here go through the target app’s own text-selection handling, not a WM-Keyboard-side clipboard bypass (see Clipboard manager for the separate clipboard history panel these actions feed into).