Custom iPhone gestures and triggers

I’ve been trying to perfect my capture system, and I want to know: Is there any way to map scripts or Shortcuts to custom iPhone gestures?

Use cases

  1. In iOS chrome, I would love it if some gesture (ie extra long press, circle swipe, two finger long press, etc…) would trigger a script/Shortcut/function that saves or embeds the page URL in Notion or Drafts or better yet pops up a contextual menu with options as to where the link should be sent and, when chosen, next menu displays fields to enter metadata (ie topic category, database field).

  2. This isn’t a capture thing, just a text composing wish: I’d be overjoyed if I could double-tap the right or left side of the iPhone keyboard space bar when I’m composing text to skip from word to word (like “option + right/left arrow key” in macOS) and three taps would jump the start or end of the line (like “command + right/left arrow”).

These feel like a BetterTouchTool solutions but BTT doesn’t seem to have this feature and AFAICT there’s nothing out there. I’ve also tooled around in the iOS Accessibility settings but no dice.

Any ideas?

For #1, this is not supported by the operating system. The only “gesture” like options generally available are the back tapping options in accessibility. You could potentially use that to trigger a shortcut, but it isn’t going to have context and Shortcuts can’t reach into Chrome.

It should be possible for the Chrome app to do things like provide such custom options on say a long press - you would just have to convince Google’s developers to build it into the app.

For #2, I think that the word skipping could be supported by a third party soft keyboard. I’m just not aware of one that does this. Again you could reach out to the developer of your favourite alternative soft keyboard and ask if they could consider adding something.

You do mention Drafts, so I would note specifically for this app that you can add keyboard row actions (a row of buttons that sits at the bottom of a draft above a keyboard) to jump back and forth across words. In fact, such actions are available in one of the default action groups.

I followed your advice and sent Google a feature request.

As a side note, I’ve always found user-initiated communications w Google opaque. AFAICT they’re usually sloppy about following up with emailed support requests, unlike most other software companies. I suppose it’s because they’re so dominant that there’s little incentive and so mainstream that they’re overloaded w unsophisticated requests.

If only there a way to get through to the right person, follow clear metadata-tagging procedures so it’s not too onerous for that person to field, actually get a response, and even a estimated feature delivery date or potential next step…