If you’ve had an iPhone for a while, you probably think you’ve got it all figured out. But as with any piece of technology, there are plenty of hidden hacks you probably don’t know about. Take your iPhone’s keyboard, for example. You probably know that you can long-press the space bar to turn the keyboard into a mini trackpad. You probably also know that you can double-tap the space bar to add a period at the end of a sentence. But there’s a trick that’s much more subtle and could change the way you type on your iPhone.

Let’s start with the problem first: accessing certain secondary characters on iOS is annoying. On many Android keyboards, your main keyboard has a row of numbers, as well as common characters like a comma or period. That’s not the case on the iPhone: when using apps like iMessage, your main keyboard is made up almost entirely of letters, save for the space bar, delete, shift, and return keys. Sure, you don’t need the period key when you double-tap the space bar, but to access other secondary characters, you’ll first need to tap the 123 key.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing: there are a lot of keys hidden here, including question marks, exclamation points, commas, and numbers. It is, however, a little frustrating. You tap 123, choose your character, and then have to tap 123 again to get back to typing letters. That’s not so bad if that character ends your sentence: you can choose a question mark and then hit send on your message, which automatically returns you to the main keyboard anyway. But if you’re in the middle of something, you’ll have to constantly switch between these different menus to type properly. If you want to add a comma to a sentence, you have to tap 123, tap your comma, tap 123 again, and move on. But there’s a better way.

Instead of tapping and releasing 123, you press and hold it. When you hold your finger on the 123 key, you have one of two options: With the same finger, you can swipe to the character you want to add, release, and add the character to the text field and automatically switch back to the main keyboard. Or, you can use your other finger to tap the secondary characters you need and then release 123, which, again, automatically switches back to the main keyboard.