How to select, copy, and paste on the Apple Vision Pro with hand gestures

The Apple Vision Pro is a bit of an odd beast for fulfilling productivity tasks. On one hand, it makes a spectacular external monitor for Macs, especially when combined with the Mac’s mouse and keyboard. On the other hand, if you want to use the Vision Pro on its own, things get a little more challenging.

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Take selecting, cutting, copying, and pasting text. In this article, we’ll look at the hand gestures you can use to accomplish these basic tasks.

I’ll tell you upfront that making these hand gestures with precision is tricky. The features are there, however, so let’s look at how to make them work.

I won’t discuss the alternative method of using a physical Apple keyboard with the Vision Pro. That method works using the same command keys we’re all used to. 

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If you want to use your fingers and eyes with the virtual tools, this guide is for you.

Universal Clipboard

Let’s start with the Universal Clipboard. This useful Apple feature lets all your devices share what’s on your clipboard so you can copy some text on your Mac and paste it on your iPhone, or copy something on your iPad and paste it on your Mac. In the case of the Vision Pro, the easiest way to add text is by copying text on a Mac or iPad, and pasting it on the Vision Pro.

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To do this, you need to be sure that Bluetooth is turned on for all your devices, all your devices are using the same Wi-Fi SSID, and all your devices are using the same iCloud account.

Once that’s done, be sure Handoff is enabled on your Vision Pro. Handoff is the technology that controls Universal Clipboard. To turn it on, go to General in Settings and scroll down to Handoff:

Tap its label, and then toggle Handoff to on:

Here, I copied the article description from one of my ZDNET articles while on my Mac and, using Handoff and Universal Clipboard, pasted it onto a note in my Vision Pro:

You can see above how the device states where the clipboard came from — in this case, a Mac named Eagle.

Selecting text

I won’t lie to you; selecting text on Apple Vision Pro is difficult. The mechanics are straightforward, but the mechanism — the eye tracking — makes it hard.

The first thing you need to do is click somewhere in your text. To do this, look at where you want the cursor to go and then pinch and hold your fingers together, as shown below:

The challenge is that your only pointing device is your eyes, and eye tracking at the pixel level isn’t perfect. I had to adopt a hard stare. Even then, the selection location wasn’t always correct:

Once you have your cursor in place, you’ll see a menu. Glance at Select, do the finger tap, and you’ll see the selection bubbles:

You can extend the selection to either side of the text, but to do so, you must direct your eyes exactly to the bubble and move your fingers. Apple’s eye tracking, at least for me, isn’t nearly accurate enough to make this a reliable activity.

I could make selections, but after doing so for just a few minutes, I found myself rather cranky. It’s challenges like this that make me rethink the $3,499 base price of this device.

Also: Apple Vision Pro tricks: How to take perfect screenshots and recordings (and avoid weirdness)

In any case, with a bunch of retries and some concentration, you should be able to select whatever you want.

Cutting and copying

Once you’ve selected some text, you can cut it by focusing your eyes on the Cut item in the popup menu and tapping your thumb and forefinger:

Copy works the same way, except that you focus on the word Copy. To paste, you focus on the word Paste and tap your fingers together:

And there you go — that’s how to select, cut, copy, and paste using nothing but your eyes and the tips of your fingers. I’d say it’s almost magical if it wasn’t so frustrating.

Have you tried cutting and pasting using the Vision Pro? Did you find it fussy, or did it go smoothly for you? Are you using the Vision Pro as a machine for writing, using only the virtual controls? Let us know in the comments below.

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