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Unexpected Keyboard
- ivolimmen 2y agoI just installed it. And thus far: it makes sense. I need to get used to this one. Weird thing is: I don't mis the autocorrect other keyboards usually have.
- out_of_protocol 2y agoCalculator++ is lovely, i like how it works. These swiping buttons especially usefull on small-ish screens. P.S. tried keyboard, should work wery well with termux. Did not figure out how to swith to next language. Custom keys, yay!
- lovegrenoble 2y agowhere's the link to Calculator++ ?
- uneekname 2y agoIt's listed as a "similar app" in the README. I think it has a similar feature where you can swipe on keyboard keys to type different characters.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago> Did not figure out how to swith to next language 1. Select the needed ones in the settings 1. Swipe up on the space bar
- out_of_protocol 2y agoSwipe on specebar = cursor movement, which is useful
- out_of_protocol 2y agoEdit: manually added languages again in settings and "swipe up" action appear
- desireco42 2y agoI just installed it...mind blown. Thank you for posting this. Super easy to use... usual spelling errors are gone... would need a multilingual/serbian keyboard :) as well
- ivanche 2y agoIt has both latin and cyrillic! Go to settings and tap Add an alternate layout.
- tetris11 2y agoI've been unsatisfied with Heliboard, so I might give this a try
- norswap 2y agoSee MessagEase for a similar keyboard (not programmer-focused) with less keys but letting you use the swiping motion to type ordinary — great for fat-fingered people.
- kqr 2y agoIn a similar category we find also GKOS (uses chording to get the corner symbols) and I will always have a soft spot for KeyBee. https://entropicthoughts.com/rethinking-text-input-on-touchscreens https://entropicthoughts.com/rethinking-text-input-on-touchs...
- Nullabillity 2y agoI'd call MessagEase-style keyboards good for programming too - no (need for) autocorrect, and the extra room lets you squeeze in most symbols and modifiers.
- CarVac 2y agoOr Thumb-key, an open-source take on that.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoHow long does it take to learn https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key ? Is it like retraining yourself to use Dvorak? Or more like learning the Palm strokes?
- bean-weevil 2y agoI switched to dvorak a few years ago and to thumb-key this year. I would say that thumb-key is much easier to learn than dvorak. I simply switched to it and about three months later, I realized I had gotten up to almost my original typing speed without any directed effort. I originally typed at 45 wpm on AnySoftKeyboard, and now I type at 40 wpm on thumb-key. This is in contrast to dvorak, which took six months of at least 15mins a day of dedicated practice time to surpass my original speed.
- gavinhoward 2y agoThis was...unexpected... Unexpectedly good. I am definitely going to relearn typing on my phone just to use this.
- zuluonezero 2y agoThanks this seems very good. Being able to flick #! off the 'e' is nice. The position of . and , is a bit weird on the left of the keybord. But i do like the curser control and brackets usage. There is some buggy activity with capitals appearing eg ttt55555%%%%%TTT% randomly. And it misses autocomplete and auto capitalisation for general usec
- kqr 2y agoI used to have a phone with a physical keyboard that had a ctrl key. I can't live without ctrl-z, ctrl-v, etc. This keyboard made it possible to go to a fully-touchscreen phone without being too miserable! (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.
- metalliqaz 2y agoI have never felt the loss of ctrl+key combinations on my phone. For what do you use these things? For example, if I'm already using my finger to select text, I can just long press to copy.
- kqr 2y agoBut I'm not selecting with gestures! I press ctrl-a most of the time. Then I might adjust with shift-space-swipe, much like I would with arrow keys on a physical keyboard. 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.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoOn iOS there was at least at some point a "shake to undo" or a 3 fingered swipe I could never get to trigger, infuriating, I just live without undo now.
- yellowapple 2y agoI've been using this for a couple years now and it's been fantastic. Just the Compose Key support alone is a godsend. The swiping takes some getting used to, but with practice it now feels second-nature.
- stavros 2y agoDo you not need astonishing precision to not make any mistakes?
- yellowapple 2y agoI don't feel like I make more mistakes than I typically do with any other smartphone keyboard. One particularly annoying mistake I make all the time is hitting backspace when I meant to hit a character near it, but that was always a problem with other keyboards and my fat thumbs, too.
- arcanemachiner 2y agoJust installed it now. I think it's missing the '2 spaces for period-and-space' feature but it seems pretty nice other than that! (I guess that makes sense for a programming keyboard though.)
- natebc 2y ago> '2 spaces for period-and-space' 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/punctuation/space-after-period https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/punctuatio...
- drdec 2y agoI believe the GP meant that some keyboards will produce '. ' when the spacebar is tapped twice.
- winterbloom 2y agowhat's wrong with this?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xp84 2y agoYeah on Apple devices two spaces gets converted to a period and one space. It’s just a shortcut, it doesn’t leave the 2 spaces in.
- arcanemachiner 2y agoYeah, I was talking about the shortcut. Although, since a period is just a swipe away, it's not so bad.
- caxco93 2y agonow I can use this and try to be like this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42374823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42374823
- guyzero 2y agoVery innovative but it seems to require a level of precision that I don't think I've achieved on a phone keyboard.
- stavros 2y agoIs there a keyboard that uses GPT-2 or some other such LLM to predict what I'm trying to write? SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys and it always writes the right thing, but it's fairly abandoned with a few perplexing bugs. 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).
- bean-weevil 2y ago[FUTO Keyboard](https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/) uses a local LLM for suggestions and corrections.
- stavros 2y agoThank you!
- brunoqc 2y agoI like the idea of their keyboard a lot, but I wish they didn't use that license.
- bean-weevil 2y agoI don't like it either. I'm glad they started calling it Source First™ instead of incorrectly calling it open source though.
- desireco42 2y agoI use it, it is not very good, ie. it is pretty bad in terms of predictions. Love the mission and everything, just prediction is bad. I thought once it learns it will be better, but it's been months..
- rpdillon 2y agoFUTO is mediocre with swiping and predictions in my experience, but the 70M parameter voice model is stunningly good at 30-second voice to text. It has completely changed how I think about using my phone to draft prose - my first drafts are now often from my phone, snippets collected in moments when it occurs to me on-the-fly. It's been a really significant shift in the utility of my phone, and because it's installable through F-Droid, I have it on my Amazon tablet, and Boox reader. It's worked really well across all of them.
- Elfener 2y agoI have been using this for a few years now. Has all the keys I could want. Actually makes ssh-ing from termux not a bad experience. 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.
- girvo 2y agoDoes anyone else remember the "TouchPal" keyboard on Windows Mobile? It was similar in some ways. https://i0.wp.com/farm3.static.flickr.com/2142/1622925926_3ae8606681_o.jpg 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.
- tasuki 2y agoI'm desperate for an Android keyboard! I need to type English, Czech, and Polish. We live in the age of LLMs, they not only know the words, they know how to use them together! Shocking! 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!
- stavros 2y agoSomeone downthread proposed FUTO keyboard, I'm trying it right now and it's fantastic. Give it a shot !
- aftbit 2y agoI used to use slide typing, but I've mostly reverted to tapping, at least the first 3 or 4 letters, until autocomplete can figure out what I want. I'm not really sure why, it just feels more natural.
- gitaarik 2y agoDid you try AnySoft Keyboard?
- vonunov 2y agoMultiling O Keyboard
- justsomehnguy 2y agoUsing it since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32658104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32658104 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.
- a_e_k 2y agoInteresting. I've been using the Hacker's Keyboard with Termux, but it doesn't seem to have received any updates in a long time. (I'm fine with programs being considered complete, but I also realize that Android is unfortunately a moving target.) Has anyone used both and could compare them?
- z2h-a6n 2y agoI've used both, though I'm not sure I can compare them directly, since it has been a year or more since I switched from Hacker's Keyboard. 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.
- cfiggers 2y ago> 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. 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.
- kqr 2y agoDoes GBoard allow you to select text by pressing shift and then swiping on space?
- gitaarik 2y agoVery nice keyboard. It would be so awesome if auto-complete and auto-correct would be added as optional features.
- amake 2y agoThis is very similar to Japanese "flick" input: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhD6r8NKlmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhD6r8NKlmY
- 3r7j6qzi9jvnve 2y agoJapanese flick input is closer to thumb-key ( https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key I just discovered in another comment), and even that's a bit different as you get to input a consonant+vowel pair at a time (e.g. ka-ki-ku-ke-ko on a key) 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.
- shwouchk 2y agoAwesome stuff! I used to use Hackers Keyboard (up until … now!) but it’s not OSS, hasnt been updated, and i use the swipe even there. Thanks for sharing! [edit] Even more for making!
- romulobribeiro 2y agoI literally downloaded last week this keyboard to do the Advent of Code on the go
- eviks 2y agoGreat idea to allow multiple symbols per key, though it's not worth losing swipe over, so these should be behind a longer key press (hold for .5 sec then swipe to the corner ) or a double tap Is they any keyboard that combines those and is also customizable? 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
- mouse_ 2y agoSwipe isn't a good fit for terminal input, which is the usecase for this keyboard.
- eviks 2y agoWhy not? Swiping is less error prone, might need a different dictionary, though, to better match common commands and other patterns.
- vitiral 2y agoSome of us don't use swipe, this is great for me
- 1209412comb 2y agoI actually think swipe user is a minority ? I have never seen a swipe user in my circle but given how much people talk about it online, it must be quite popular in the US at least.
- vitiral 2y agoI don't mean the App, I mean the action
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago150ms, not 500. Try it. Gboard already has this built in. Feels very snappy if you do it this way. And you don't give up swipe nor tapping.
- 1209412comb 2y agoThis is similar to how Japanese use a 3x4 flick but the difference is that 1 word is typically 3-6 syllables where Latin is double the amount, also triple the amount of words per sentence.
- maguay 2y agoSad that a keyboard even needs to say that it's "privacy-conscious." What a world we've built, where one might reasonably worry that their keyboard _isn't_ private.
- enoeht 2y agoI never developed much trust in current smartphones where in some countries the SIM can be a backdoor.
- sandos 2y agoAnd the baseband everywhere?
- rollcat 2y agoThe standalone microcontroller in your physical keyboard can run arbitrary code, and it's been able to since we've invented keyboards attached to the computer via a port. What's there to stop the manufacturer (or a sophisticated attacker) from: - 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.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoNothing beats the privacy-oriented FUTO keyboard for me.
- rustcleaner 2y agoIt's great, just NEEDS one thing: Configuration export/import.
- adakbar 2y agoThank you for posting, this is game changer, I have quite an old phone and this keyboard help me use it less unbearable
- hiked 2y agoI love the small keyboard
- neves 2y agoAny keyboard with an undo button?
- mosquitobiten 2y agoThumbKey inspired Querty, that's cool I guess.
- watersb 2y agoiOS app Textastic features a similar swipe-to-key-corner feature. https://www.textasticapp.com/ https://www.textasticapp.com/ It's wonderful. There's also a macOS version.
- glacierSong 2y agoI use keyboard with similar concept as this for more than 10 years. It uses a 3 by 3 key with additional column for control so like an old phone but swipe based. I like it because I can use 1 hand to write on phone. The application called MessageEase[0] before they go subscription based and now I use Thumb-Key[1]. [0] https://www.exideas.com/ME/ https://www.exideas.com/ME/ [1] https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key