Add an Escape Key to the iPad’s Smart Keyboard

Learn how to add an escape key to the iPad’s smart keyboard by remapping keys.

If you have an iPad with a Smart Keyboard, you may have noticed it does not have an Escape key. With the Escape key on a Mac, you can ‘escape’ out of viewing videos in full screen or other areas of an app. How can you do this on an iPad if it doesn’t have an Esacpe key? You can tell the iPad to use a different key as an Escape key, such as the seldom used Caps Lock. See how to tell the iPad to use a specific key as an Escape key in this video.

Video TranscriptIn this video, we’re going to look at how we can add an escape key to our hardware keyboard on the iPad. If you have an iPad pro with a smart keyboard, you may have noticed that it doesn’t have an escape. Now, why would you want to have an escape key? Well, when you open up an video, when you open up a video and safari and full screen, the only way that you can get that back into safari is by tapping on the screen and then tapping on the X in the upper left-hand corner on a Mac, we can just hit the escape key, or maybe you’re in some part of a program you want to get out of it on the Mac, we just hit the escape.

We can’t do that on the iPad. Well, I’m going to show you how you can do that on the iPad, how you can map one of the keys, such as the caps lock key to be the escape key. Let’s go to my iPad. So I’m looking at my iPad here and let’s go and open up a web page. So what I’m going to do is go over to safari here, and then I have.

Site pulled up here and I want to open this up in full screen in order to do that. What we do is we go over to the far right here of the video. We tap on these little squares here. It opens up in full screen. Now the only way that I can get this back into windowed mode or back into safari is by going to the upper right-hand corner.

And then when I tap on the screen, you’re going to see this ad. So I need to tap on that and it brings me back again on a Mac. I’d be able to just hit the escape key. Well, if we look at my keyboard here, I’m going to go to my keyboard here. You’re going to see it does not have an escape key. So what I need to do is I need to map one of these keys.

I prefer to use the caps lock key. I need to map one of these keys over to be an escape. How do we do that? Well, we do this through the settings app. So I’m going to go back over to my iPad here. And now what we need to do is we need to go to our settings app. So I’m just going to swipe up and we go over to settings under settings.

We need to go over to general and under general, you’re going to see keyboard. So now I just click on. And up towards the top, we have hardware keyboard because I have a hardware keyboard here. So now I just click on this and then down towards the bottom, you’re going to see modifier keys. This is what we’re going to adjust as the modify your keys.

So I click on this and here we have caps lock. The cap slot key is already mapped to be obviously the caps lock key. We don’t want it to do that. We want it to be the escape key. So now what I do is I click on it. And then you’re going to see a scape. I click on this and now when I press that escape key, or I should say, when I press that caps lock key, it is now going to be the escape key.

So now let’s go back over to my site and this time we’re going to show my iPad as well as the screen. So I’m going to share both here so we can see my iPad there as well as the keyboard. So I’m going to open. Safari here and let’s go back into full screen. I just go over to the right here and I click on this.

It’s in full screen. Now what I want to do is I want to bring it back into windowed mode. All I have to do is just go over to my caps, lock key here. And when I press on it, watch what happens. The video goes back into safari. It is now an escape key. So that’s how we can map one of our key. To be an escape key on the iPad.

We do this through the settings app. We just go to settings general keyboard, and you’re going to see hardware keyboard from there. You’re going to see modifier keys, just select which modifier key you want to use. In my case, I use the caps lock key. I never use it for an actual caps lock key. So now what I can do is I can remap that over to be my escape.

So that’s how we can map our keys or map and escape key to one of our modifier keys on the iPad.