Swiping: The Surprisingly Pleasurable Way to Text (Or Type) On A Phone

Jaws drop when people see this for the first time.

Photo by Wahyu Setiawan on Unsplash

If you’re going to spend your days caressing your phone, why not make it a pleasant tactile experience?

Maybe you’re like me. I’ve never been a very good phone typist. Heck, I’ve never been a very good typist, which is why I use voice dictation as my primary typing approach on the desktop.

On phones, voice dictation is cumbersome for long pieces of text, and pecking away on such a small display is annoying — to me, anyway. It makes me feel like I’m all thumbs.

That changed around 2010 when I discovered swiping. I was ecstatic! More than ten years later, I thought everyone knew about this texting method. But every once in a while, someone sees me swiping for the first time, and they do a double-take.

So I guess it’s not as common knowledge as I thought. Time to change this.

Using Keyboard Swiping for Texting

Here is swiping in action:

Swiping in action at 4x speed. Capture by the author.