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I feel like the touch inputs are a bigger hinderance than the screen. Manipulating text with a touch screen keyboard is torture.

cess11 1y ago
I find PentiKeyboard to strike a nice balance. You get six circles sized depending on where you put your fingers, and they contain most of what you expect from a regular keyboard, plus convenience chord for Ctrl+b to hasten tmux actions, in-keyboard cheat sheet and a character lookup and picker. Ergonomically it's quite good, your fingers end up in a convenient place and when you want to reallocate your body you remove and reset the circles to new positions. The drawback is that on a phone you need to use both hands to type, but if you're doing something like programming or text editing you'll likely be rather involved anyway. It's also nice that the keyboard doesn't hide half the screen, instead you can look through the circles or touch outside of them to temporarily hide the keyboard entirely. Edit: Right, forgot to mention perhaps the best functionality, the sixth circle repeats the last bytes it sent, so if you do some action you have a button to just do it again and again. Comes in handy all the time. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_lab.pentikeyboard&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_la...
- archerx 1y ago
  Wow that’s interesting but I don’t think I would ever use that. I can actually type really quickly with the touch keyboard but the problem is going back to correct things. On iOS getting the cursor to move back to a previous part of the text to fix an error is and adventure in frustration. Even holding down the space button and draggging the text cursor around is awful. A lot of the times it’s just faster and easier to erase large chunks of text and rewrite it.
  - cess11 1y ago
    Yeah, I really missed Penti when I had to use an iOS device for work for a while. I'm mostly in a terminal, commonly in vim, where the 'regular keyboard' experience makes text and code editing quite convenient compared to the usual software keyboard suspects. In web forms and the like it's also fairly convenient, one can send move left and then hit repeat until the correct position (or any number of arrow key equivalents for moving rows). I hardly ever move the cursor by pointing somewhere in the text. It took me something like three weeks to become really fluent in Penti, back in 2017-2018 I think.

cess11 1y ago

I find PentiKeyboard to strike a nice balance. You get six circles sized depending on where you put your fingers, and they contain most of what you expect from a regular keyboard, plus convenience chord for Ctrl+b to hasten tmux actions, in-keyboard cheat sheet and a character lookup and picker. Ergonomically it's quite good, your fingers end up in a convenient place and when you want to reallocate your body you remove and reset the circles to new positions. The drawback is that on a phone you need to use both hands to type, but if you're doing something like programming or text editing you'll likely be rather involved anyway. It's also nice that the keyboard doesn't hide half the screen, instead you can look through the circles or touch outside of them to temporarily hide the keyboard entirely. Edit: Right, forgot to mention perhaps the best functionality, the sixth circle repeats the last bytes it sent, so if you do some action you have a button to just do it again and again. Comes in handy all the time. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_lab.pentikeyboard&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_la...

archerx 1y ago
Wow that’s interesting but I don’t think I would ever use that. I can actually type really quickly with the touch keyboard but the problem is going back to correct things. On iOS getting the cursor to move back to a previous part of the text to fix an error is and adventure in frustration. Even holding down the space button and draggging the text cursor around is awful. A lot of the times it’s just faster and easier to erase large chunks of text and rewrite it.
- cess11 1y ago
  Yeah, I really missed Penti when I had to use an iOS device for work for a while. I'm mostly in a terminal, commonly in vim, where the 'regular keyboard' experience makes text and code editing quite convenient compared to the usual software keyboard suspects. In web forms and the like it's also fairly convenient, one can send move left and then hit repeat until the correct position (or any number of arrow key equivalents for moving rows). I hardly ever move the cursor by pointing somewhere in the text. It took me something like three weeks to become really fluent in Penti, back in 2017-2018 I think.