About one month ago I bought a fantastic Kinesis Freestyle2 Blue for Mac keyboard with VIP3 accessory to try to solve a pain I had on the left hand. The pain had gone and this is very important. Freestyle2 is really a great keyboard!

Freestyle2 Blue for Mac

One of the features I like with this keyboard is that it has three bluetooth channels. I’ve paired it with my office Mac, my iPhone and the Mac laptop I have at home. Everything works really fine with Macs, but I would like to improve the way I use it with the iPhone.

I’ve searched some info about bluetooth keyboard and iPhone, but I’ve found a lot of stuff that sometimes works sometimes not, so I decide to collect my results in this post, so it might be useful also for other people.

Keyboard shortcuts1

My iPhone 6 is running iOS 9.3.1

⌘ = command

⌃ = ctrl

⌥ = option

⇧ = shift

⇥ = tab

General

⌘Space = Enable/Disable Spotlight search

⌘H = Go to Home screen, when you’re inside an App

⌃Space = Select the keyboard language

I haven’t found a way to move between home screens and to select an App to open it. So to open an App, I start a spotlight search and digit the app name. The “trick” to open something from the spotlight search is really the keystone to use the external keyboard. For example, if you want to write someone with WhatsApp, just search his/her name with spotlight, then when WhatsApp is open, type ⇥ and begin to write. I don’t know why, but the “trick” doesn’t always work. I sometimes don’t find what I need with spotlight (i.e. WhatsApp lookup sometimes doesn’t return results), so I need a deeper analysis of how to use Spotlight in a proficient way.

Another problem I see is that sometimes the shortcuts stop working, so I have to reboot the iPhone to have them available again. I have to understand how to go in the status where shortcuts don’t work.

Spotlight search

⇅ = Move selection in the results of search

Return = Open selected result

Mail

⌘N = New email

After you’ve selected an email, so it’s open

⌘R = Reply

⇧⌘D = Send email

Space = Scroll down the email

⇅ = Move to previous/next email

Safari

⌘R = Reload the page

⌘T = Open a new tab

⌘W = Close current tab

⇅ = Move page up/down a bit

Space = Scroll down the page

⇧Space = Scroll up the page

Facebook

I haven’t found any working shortcuts.

OmniFocus https://support.omnigroup.com/documentation/omnifocus/ios/3.1.1/en/gestures-and-keyboard-shortcuts/#keyboard-shortcuts

  1. Last update 31st May 2019 ↩