SwipeExpander is a new jailbreak tweak that brings powerful keyboard shortcut gestures to the iPhone à la AltKeyboard. The tweak employs swipe-up and swipe-down keyboard gestures to invoke a variety of different actions, from mundane copy/paste shortcuts, to insert text shortcuts.
One of the cool things about SwipeExpander is that lowercase and uppercase keys are deemed separate, meaning you can have a large variety of keyboard gestures across the 26 letters in the english alphabet. But that’s not all, SwipeExpander plays nice with well-known and respected keyboard related tweaks like SwipeSelection, PredictiveKeyboard, and more. Check out our hands-on video inside.
Once SwipeExpander is installed, you can configure it via the preferences in the stock Settings. The preferences contain an edit mode that can be used to assign swipe-up and swipe-down gestures to virtually every key on iOS’ keyboard.
Available actions consist of the following:
- Insert Text
- Select
- Select All
- Cut
- Copy
- Paste
- Undo
- Redo
- Delete Forward
- Delete Word
- Dismiss Autocorrect
- Dismiss Keyboard
Each key can have up to two gestures assigned to it with two corresponding actions. Actions and gestures can be removed or edited by going back into edit mode and selecting the key previously assigned with actions.
SwipeExpander contains several additional options as well. Users can opt to display letter case and show names on keys, along with the ability to adjust the opacity, size, and position of the names assigned to keys.
Although the tweak is still in beta, the version I tested worked fairly well in practice. It’s nowhere near as polished as AltKeyboard, but again, the tweak is beta and the developer hopes to iron out the process as it gets closer to release.
If you’d like to try the SwipeExpander beta for free, add developer Jerry En’s repo to your list of Cydia sources: http://cydia.jerryen.com/
Once you try it, let us know what you thought about it down below in the comments.