Library

External Keyboard in iOS 15

Changes in iOS 15 are effecting external keyboards in Prompt. The iPad onscreen keyboard remains unaffected.

When using an external keyboard on iPadOS 15 with the Extra Keyboard Row enabled in Prompt, the Extra Keyboard Row may obscure text at the bottom of the terminal. iPadOS 15 also adds a new floating keyboard options box that may obscure the lower-right corner of the screen, and whose presence seems to be the main source of the previous issue.

There are two workarounds to help with this:

  1. Disable “Shortcuts” and “Predictive” in System Settings > General > Keyboards. Of the two workarounds, this will result in the better Prompt experience, since it gets rid of the new iPadOS floating keyboard bar, which isn’t very useful in Prompt and gets in the way of the terminal display. However, users may want to turn these settings back on for other apps, and it will get tiring to keep toggling them.

  2. Disable “Extra Keyboard Row” in Prompt’s Keyboard settings. Users will not be able to use the functionality of the key bar (which means arrow keys don’t work), and the mostly useless iPadOS floating keyboard will obscure the bottom-right corner of the terminal.

In Prompt, the iPadOS floating keyboard has the following buttons: Show Keyboard, Show Emoji, Keyboard Settings, and Dictation.

Do you support third-party keyboards?

Yes! Third-party keyboards are fully supported. It’s important to note, however, that we only have the ability to suppress auto-correct and predictive text on the native iOS keyboard. This could result in predictions of sensitive information within the terminal. Awkwardly, this is totally beyond our control. To ensure the security of your data, stick with the iOS keyboard while you’re in the terminal.

Do Bluetooth keyboards work?

Oh yes. Arrow keys, text selection, and even all your most-used keyboard shortcuts: ⌘+Z, ⌘+S, and more.

Is there an Alt key?

In most cases, the Esc key does the same thing as the Alt key. Use it!

The Delete key inserts funky control characters in my editor. Fix?

For vim, add :fixdel to your .vimrc file. For emacs, click here.

Can I remap any keyboard keys, like Alt or Caps Lock?

Not currenty, but this is a highly requested feature that will likely make it into Prompt at some point.