(Although some level of misery is hard to get out of with only a touchscreen.)
I have used this keyboard for over a year now I think and it's really good.
Selecting the appropriate text is already a challenge in so many circumstances. Having to tap again exactly inside the selection, then choose from the floating menu are two more failure points and interaction lag.
It's especially painful when trying to select single characters (which happens a lot in CJK land).
I wish I could join the GBoard team for two weeks, just add an optional ctrl key, and quit.
PS: Actually, mapping the physical Volume Up to Copy, Volume Down to Paste whenever there's no media playing or some other condition could be the best choice.
I hate long pressing. It's so slow and imprecise.
Ctrl-z to undo is an action usually not available from the context menu or elsewhere.
Oh and pressing ctrl-d to send EOF in a subshell in Termux is much more convenient than typing "exit" or whatever.
Has anyone used both and could compare them?
Unexpected Keyboard works well for me when using Termux, possibly even better than Hacker's Keyboard, since I find it easier to swipe on a key to get to uncommonly-used symbols rather than switching to a different keyboard layer. Every now and then I accidentally swipe a key when I meant to press it, and end up entering a accented character when I didn't mean to, but this is fairly rare. I don't use Termux very often, but for occasional vim or terminal usage it's totally sufficient.
One cool feature of Unexpected Keyboard (which may be available elsewhere, I haven't looked at many others) is that you can swipe left and right on the space bar to quickly and accurately scroll left and right in a text field. I find this about as fast as tapping at a position in a text field, but much more accurate.
Nice! That's a feature of Google's GBoard, which ships as the default on Pixels but is available to most Android phones. I use it extremely often (including twice while writing this comment) and not having it is one of the big reasons I found Hacker Keyboard frustrating. Hearing that Unexpected Keyboard has it is pushing me over the edge to give it a trial run.
I recently learned about a hidden iphone feature. If you hold the spacebar for about halve a second you can move freely the cursor around any text field.
I still use Gboard for my main keyboard, but looking for replacement suggestions that have a good swipe to text
Swipe worked pretty well but I had some problems (perhaps switching languages or something? can't remember) so I switched back to plain AOSP keyboard for now.
I'd love to find a maintained keyboard that can predict as well as SwiftKey, and has all the other "simple" niceties SwiftKey has on Android (second layer with long press, configurable durations, customizable keys, emoji search, etc).
I thought once it learns it will be better, but it's been months..
You don't need GPT for that, you need a dictionary lookup and some stats on how the keyboard is used. See how Ken Kocienda implemented the original virtual keyboard for iOS: https://hiddenheroes.netguru.com/hurst-han-kocienda Scroll down to "But as promising as the Purple interface was, the software suffered from a potentially fatal flaw: it was impossible to use a virtual keyboard on a phone-sized screen. "
I hate the iOS keyboard situation so much. Third party ones either crash and dump you randomly on the Apple one, or they have their own frustrating bugs. And the Apple one is of course more stable (or maybe just relaunches so fast nobody knows when it crashes) but it is ruined by its lack of a number row (or any other options) as well as bugs like the above.
I disable auto-correct and word suggestions, always get annoyed by "drag around and find out what your mistap gave you!" features - and here I read someone _dreaming_ about "general vicinity" understand-er
fascinating
Not my experience at all. Been using it for 10 years, whenever I manage to write a 10 word sentence without needing to correct anything I feel like i just won the lottery.
I have settled for FUTO Keyboard for now. Bevor that I used SwiftKey. (The Sony is still the only one where I did see contextual self-learning/prediction.)
The numbers should also be in a numpad layout, unfortunately common mistake even in custom keyboards
Also some keys in good central positions like sdf are surprising empty, could reduce the overload of other keys by shifting some symbols there
Wonder how convenient corner gestures are vs pure horizontal/vertical
I love the ability to quickly copy, paste, select-all, type special characters, etc., all without having to do anything complicated. It took me a little bit of time to get used to the layout, but now I type exactly what I want, as I want it, without any auto-correct or automation needed. I make few errors and love the whole way of doing it. QWERTY makes very little sense on such a small screen, but it's what people know.
Is it like retraining yourself to use Dvorak? Or more like learning the Palm strokes?
https://entropicthoughts.com/rethinking-text-input-on-touchs...
I actually want to get around making something customisable. A keyboard that you will put whatever keys you want, wherever you want. iPhone is too small for a comfortable keyboard, otherwise.
P.S. tried keyboard, should work wery well with termux. Did not figure out how to swith to next language. Custom keys, yay!
1. Select the needed ones in the settings
1. Swipe up on the space bar
[0] https://www.exideas.com/ME/ [1] https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
Unexpectedly good. I am definitely going to relearn typing on my phone just to use this.
My mom (not a programmer) uses it as well because she is able to type much faster with the swiping than with a regular touch keyboard.
It was similar in some ways.
https://i0.wp.com/farm3.static.flickr.com/2142/1622925926_3a...
QW and a symbol were all on one key in a T shaped layout - Q top left, W top right, symbol below, you could just hit the key as-is and let predictive text/auto-correct do it's thing (badly, at the time).
The more interesting way to use it was to swipe on the key in the direction of the letter/symbol you wanted.
It was really quite good, and a shame it never caught on.
I hate to be the one to break it to you but ... I think we're not supposed to do this any more? It's a change I still struggle with.
Apologies to any I've offended with this. Style guides were updated in the last 4-5 years to say that one single space after a period is correct. I think Word even changed how it handles it as well.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/punctuatio...
I'd like to use glide typing (slide finger to type). Yet all the Android keyboards I've tried (GBoard and Microsoft SwifKey) can't hint basic forms of words an elementary school child would know.
Wrt Unexpected Keyboard, I find it tedious to type all letters separately on a touchscreen. Don't you?
Help me!
I switch between Japanese input and hacker keyboard all the time for termux and it's much faster to type Japanese; this thread made me want to try both thumb-key and unexpected keyboard but I think I'll try thumb-key first.
Configuration export/import.
Super easy to use... usual spelling errors are gone... would need a multilingual/serbian keyboard :) as well
Thanks for sharing!
[edit]
Even more for making!
It's wonderful. There's also a macOS version.
What doesn't work:
1. Ctrl/Alt isn't passed to RDP session in the official MS app.
1. Sometimes number input moves the decimal to a swipe and this is kinda... dumb.
It's not as fast as Hacker's Keyboard but overall it works good and I even did wrote some small things on it.
I replaced all HK with UK on all my phones and one tablet.
Can recommend.
- recording your keystrokes in non-volatile memory, to be extracted later?
- exfiltrating them in real-time via Bluetooth (yay for wireless peripherals), WiFi, LoRa?
- asking the OS to install a driver, which (even if approved/signed) could have exploitable security holes?
The main hurdles are scale and sophistication, which, with an all-software "keyboard", were no longer an issue.
And PS/2 had a maximum draw of 100mA so even piggybacking on that would be challenging I'd assume(?) - not an expert. A Teensy which was benchmark for lots of custom keyboards can pull most of that [1].
[1] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/teensy-3-6-vs-4-0-m...
