4 ms·

I love swiping for speed, because it's usually faster than tapping and easy to do one-handed, but then there are always a bunch of words that are too similar th

I love swiping for speed, because it's usually faster than tapping and easy to do one-handed, but then there are always a bunch of words that are too similar that it can never get right, it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc. So for the longest time, I've wanted a new keyboard layout specifically designed for swiping. In the same way that Dvorak was optimized for ergonomically typing English words, I want a keyboard layout designed to minimize word overlap/ambiguity when swiping. It doesn't even necessarily have to have 26 keys, e.g. maybe there could be one key overloaded for v/w/x/z (and you long-press it if you ever want to type a single letter). On the other hand, maybe there need to be separate keys for 'e' and 'ee', or a special key for "double the previous letter". Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%.

jaggederest 4mo ago
Blast from the past here for you, probably not relevant any more, but a cool reimagining of gesture interfaces: https://www.the8pen.com/ https://www.the8pen.com/ Edit: apparently there's a modern successor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8
- horsawlarway 4mo ago
  I really liked this in the day (and i just played with the version you linked and can still remember all the key patterns - I'm typing this comment with it now). But it just can't touch swiping for speed. Frankly, the keyboard I miss most is the T9 predictive text from my old school pre smart phone era. Nothing has come close to the same expressiveness and speed while being usable completely blind, only by feel. I do feel like mobile keyboards have stagnated in a bad spot, though.
  - JdeBP 4mo ago
    I should have guessed. Of course someone has done this. (-: * https://github.com/sspanak/tt9 https://github.com/sspanak/tt9
- JdeBP 4mo ago
  If, as there, one swipe gesture per letter is allowable, rather than a gesture encompassing a whole word, then things like Thumb-Key become options. * https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key It has a similar sort of 'It doesn't have to have 26 keys on something the size and shape of a mobile 'phone.' thinking as 8vim has, whilst raising a good 'You know 'phones worked fine with a 3 by 4 grid for 60 years, ne?' point, but adding a modern twist of 'We can swipe, in the 21st century.' to the old notion of multiple letters on a button. There are still these people thinking outside of the typewriter-keyboard-on-a-'phone box. (-:
  - FireInsight 4mo ago
    Thumb-Key is awesome and I can't live without it. Clearflow sounds promising too, but I have to be able to write my,, repeated symbols and >:) smiley faces with the same speed and finesse as words (not having to thing about it at all).
    - losvedir 4mo ago
      But why would you want to? Pro-tip, I guess, ",," is normal in German and maybe other languages as a method of quoting, but it looks bizarre in English.
      - FireInsight 3mo ago
        The password for my TimeLimit (to prevent phone addiction a little bit while still being able to cheat quickly ex. to use a browser) is ",,," because it's a good balance between easy to remember but annoying enough to type on a phone I have to put some intention into it. And sometimes,,.. I just take a totally ungrammatical and weird looking thinking break while formulating a difficult thought in casual conversation.
Velocifyer 4mo ago
I have been wanting this for a while. I currently use dvorak with the split mode that happens when the phone is horizontal for good typing speed.
nulld3v 4mo ago
FUTO Swipe supports ClearFlow, which is exactly what you are talking about, a keyboard layout optimized for swiping: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/ https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/ https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163 https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163
- neves 4mo ago
  Does It work for non English languages?
  - 4gotunameagain 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - esquivalience 4mo ago
      I actually can't find the answer on either of the linked pages, so it would be good to know. And I think people's experience is more important than the claims in these discussions.
      - fnordian_slip 4mo ago
        Me neither. I added clearflow on gboard for English (US), but it didn't give me the same option for German.
        4gotunameagain 4mo ago
        Only defined for the default, english charset: https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/blob/main/Default/clearflow.yaml https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/blob/main/...
        soco 4mo ago
        And anyway, there's no keyboard on earth who can handle multi-language typing in a sane way. They either mash all languages together, or force random layouts on you, or... I stuck with GBoard because I just hate it less than others, so when I found this topic I thought yay let's try - until I read it's only for English. So there.
deepsquirrelnet 4mo ago
> Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%. 90-95% is a very good estimate! That's about what we measure on our test set. I have good news for you, and we will have a blog post about it soon. Because of how our models are built, we are able to optimize for detection accuracy directly by constructing synthetic swipes on each layout for ~50k words, and then testing them through the model. We tested around 800,000 layouts this way. The biggest issue with QWERTY is that there are far too many words that swipe colinear or obtuse angle letter trigrams. These are both hard to detect and frustrating for swipe users, because you can't clearly indicate the letters you're gesturing. Neural swipe models (at least ours) look for indicators in the gesture pattern that suggests a user was targeting a specific letter, rather than trying to match a gesture shape like algorithmic detection does. The shape of the keyboard can significantly improve the way the gestures are formed so that there is better indication of letters. The model can still respond to dwell times because unlike shape matching it uses the temporal information. But dwell interrupts flow, and in my opinion should be minimized in swipe layouts.
- soco 4mo ago
  How about context. We have these not-so-new gadgets made by design to predict the next word, I mean those LLMs... a local tiny model should be able to beat those dumb GBoard predictions any time (and a note for Google: if GBoard uses already such a local predictor, just throw it away, it's garbage)
  - me-vs-cat 4mo ago
    From https://swipe.futo.tech/ https://swipe.futo.tech/: The ContextLM model is a very small language model that is trained for a single language. It's used to improve the quality of predictions by eliminating nonsensical words given the preceding words in the sentence. It only requires text data for training.
    - 4mo ago
sholladay 4mo ago
> it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc. You mean like the two E’s in “feel” or the two L’s in “fell”? I just tried and it handles them well. Are you aware of the circling technique? When you want to double up on a letter, you briefly circle it slightly. I believe some keyboards let you hover momentarily without circling. Try it, swipe F-E-L, it should complete to “fell”, then do the same thing again but form a small, tight circle over the E, it should then complete to “feel”. Works for me every time.
- saimiam 4mo ago
  On the iPhone at least, following your instructions, I got anything from ‘feel’ to ‘fell’ to ‘grok’ to ‘felt’. Is it possible that your keyboard’s particular dictionary knows the words you’re more likely to use and adjusts for it? Edit - Also got ‘grill’. Notice how the -t in felt and -I- in grill are not near path to L.
  - sholladay 4mo ago
    My guess is you are deleting the word each time. Unlike the FUTO keyboard, the iPhone keyboard will give you different results each time after you delete because it assumes that if you delete a word, it’s probably because the autocomplete got it wrong, so it gives you a different result on the next try. A workaround is to use the Notes app and use the return key to make a new line after each try, rather than deleting. That should give you more consistent results.
- 3RTB297 4mo ago
  It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago. So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit. I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  I just horizontally backtrack my finger over the double letter. Easier to do and produces the same result.
growt 4mo ago
I wouldn't mind if similar _common_ words are mixed up. But the current state of the iOS keyboard and also gBoard is that it sometimes just makes really unhinged suggestions (at least in my native german). Words I never used before and that I didn't even know existed. I think a small AI layer on top would probably fix that, just the likelihood of next words multiplied somehow with what I possible could have swiped.
- indigo945 4mo ago
  In German, it's also extremely annoying that even common compound words will not be suggested. Google Keyboard has somewhat improved here, but FUTO Keyboard still drops the ball on this completely.
  - morsch 4mo ago
    What'd be nice for compound words particularly in German is a way to enter them separately and have them merge either automatically or as an option above the keyboard. Eg enter Bürger Dienste and have it autocorrect to Bürgerdienste. Or even Führung Kraft and turn it into Führungskraft (inserting an s).
- puttycat 4mo ago
  My guess is that an AI layer already present _is_ the reason you're seeing these unhinged suggestions. Earlier generation iOS keyboards were much more accurate and reasonable.
pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
Correction seems so mutton handed - I don't understand why, when I position the cursor for a correction it doesn't stem/postfix the word to offer options. In fact (with Gboard) the suggestions don't change with cursor position. Surely, when I place the cursor you the right of a letter I'm planning on removing that letter, or adding a letter, but the suggestions don't change according to cursor placement. There's also no apparent frecency - I had to correct cursor every time. I swiped "frecency" as "decency" - corrections offered were "d doubt difference". The swipes for those are wildly different. d->e is NNW (350°), d->i, d->o is ENE (~70°). It's really so basic. Surely they can do better than this.
a022311 4mo ago
Back when I was using QWERTY with Microsoft SwiftKey, I used to swipe a bit, but it never really felt comfortable for me. I've tried swiping again after switching to Colemak on my phone and everything is so close together that the accuracy is very low. I wonder if this model will help improve accuracy on other layouts too (or even languages!). I hope FUTO does start caring about language support, because for example their AI powered text prediction is only available for English. I'd happily train a model for them in my native language if they provided instructions on how to do so. And I'd help with swipe typing too.
WillAdams 4mo ago
Have you ever tried: http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html It was set up for just this. c.f., the opensource research project Dasher https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/ https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/
whalabi 4mo ago
Same. I don't think I have many words that get misinterpreted at all, though pretty almost always does (as pet).
mbirth 4mo ago
Back during my Palm Pilot days I’ve discovered the FITALY layout - optimised for pen input and one-finger typing. But it should work similarly efficient for swiping as the goal was to minimise travel between letters (in the English language). http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm However, there’s no Fitaly keyboard available for modern phone OSes.

jaggederest 4mo ago

Blast from the past here for you, probably not relevant any more, but a cool reimagining of gesture interfaces: https://www.the8pen.com/ https://www.the8pen.com/ Edit: apparently there's a modern successor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8

horsawlarway 4mo ago
I really liked this in the day (and i just played with the version you linked and can still remember all the key patterns - I'm typing this comment with it now). But it just can't touch swiping for speed. Frankly, the keyboard I miss most is the T9 predictive text from my old school pre smart phone era. Nothing has come close to the same expressiveness and speed while being usable completely blind, only by feel. I do feel like mobile keyboards have stagnated in a bad spot, though.
- JdeBP 4mo ago
  I should have guessed. Of course someone has done this. (-: * https://github.com/sspanak/tt9 https://github.com/sspanak/tt9
JdeBP 4mo ago
If, as there, one swipe gesture per letter is allowable, rather than a gesture encompassing a whole word, then things like Thumb-Key become options. * https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key It has a similar sort of 'It doesn't have to have 26 keys on something the size and shape of a mobile 'phone.' thinking as 8vim has, whilst raising a good 'You know 'phones worked fine with a 3 by 4 grid for 60 years, ne?' point, but adding a modern twist of 'We can swipe, in the 21st century.' to the old notion of multiple letters on a button. There are still these people thinking outside of the typewriter-keyboard-on-a-'phone box. (-:
- FireInsight 4mo ago
  Thumb-Key is awesome and I can't live without it. Clearflow sounds promising too, but I have to be able to write my,, repeated symbols and >:) smiley faces with the same speed and finesse as words (not having to thing about it at all).
  - losvedir 4mo ago
    But why would you want to? Pro-tip, I guess, ",," is normal in German and maybe other languages as a method of quoting, but it looks bizarre in English.
    - FireInsight 3mo ago
      The password for my TimeLimit (to prevent phone addiction a little bit while still being able to cheat quickly ex. to use a browser) is ",,," because it's a good balance between easy to remember but annoying enough to type on a phone I have to put some intention into it. And sometimes,,.. I just take a totally ungrammatical and weird looking thinking break while formulating a difficult thought in casual conversation.

Velocifyer 4mo ago

I have been wanting this for a while. I currently use dvorak with the split mode that happens when the phone is horizontal for good typing speed.

nulld3v 4mo ago

FUTO Swipe supports ClearFlow, which is exactly what you are talking about, a keyboard layout optimized for swiping: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/ https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/ https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163 https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163

neves 4mo ago
Does It work for non English languages?
- 4gotunameagain 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - esquivalience 4mo ago
    I actually can't find the answer on either of the linked pages, so it would be good to know. And I think people's experience is more important than the claims in these discussions.
    - fnordian_slip 4mo ago
      Me neither. I added clearflow on gboard for English (US), but it didn't give me the same option for German.
      - 4gotunameagain 4mo ago
        Only defined for the default, english charset: https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/blob/main/Default/clearflow.yaml https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/blob/main/...
        soco 4mo ago
        And anyway, there's no keyboard on earth who can handle multi-language typing in a sane way. They either mash all languages together, or force random layouts on you, or... I stuck with GBoard because I just hate it less than others, so when I found this topic I thought yay let's try - until I read it's only for English. So there.

deepsquirrelnet 4mo ago

> Because I love swiping, but all my problems with it come from the fact that the QWERTY layout is far from ideal for it. I am 100% willing to learn a new layout if anyone will develop an optimal one for English so that swiping has a 99.9% accuracy rate instead of what currently feels more like 90% or 95%. 90-95% is a very good estimate! That's about what we measure on our test set. I have good news for you, and we will have a blog post about it soon. Because of how our models are built, we are able to optimize for detection accuracy directly by constructing synthetic swipes on each layout for ~50k words, and then testing them through the model. We tested around 800,000 layouts this way. The biggest issue with QWERTY is that there are far too many words that swipe colinear or obtuse angle letter trigrams. These are both hard to detect and frustrating for swipe users, because you can't clearly indicate the letters you're gesturing. Neural swipe models (at least ours) look for indicators in the gesture pattern that suggests a user was targeting a specific letter, rather than trying to match a gesture shape like algorithmic detection does. The shape of the keyboard can significantly improve the way the gestures are formed so that there is better indication of letters. The model can still respond to dwell times because unlike shape matching it uses the temporal information. But dwell interrupts flow, and in my opinion should be minimized in swipe layouts.

soco 4mo ago
How about context. We have these not-so-new gadgets made by design to predict the next word, I mean those LLMs... a local tiny model should be able to beat those dumb GBoard predictions any time (and a note for Google: if GBoard uses already such a local predictor, just throw it away, it's garbage)
- me-vs-cat 4mo ago
  From https://swipe.futo.tech/ https://swipe.futo.tech/: The ContextLM model is a very small language model that is trained for a single language. It's used to improve the quality of predictions by eliminating nonsensical words given the preceding words in the sentence. It only requires text data for training.
  - 4mo ago

sholladay 4mo ago

> it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc. You mean like the two E’s in “feel” or the two L’s in “fell”? I just tried and it handles them well. Are you aware of the circling technique? When you want to double up on a letter, you briefly circle it slightly. I believe some keyboards let you hover momentarily without circling. Try it, swipe F-E-L, it should complete to “fell”, then do the same thing again but form a small, tight circle over the E, it should then complete to “feel”. Works for me every time.

saimiam 4mo ago
On the iPhone at least, following your instructions, I got anything from ‘feel’ to ‘fell’ to ‘grok’ to ‘felt’. Is it possible that your keyboard’s particular dictionary knows the words you’re more likely to use and adjusts for it? Edit - Also got ‘grill’. Notice how the -t in felt and -I- in grill are not near path to L.
- sholladay 4mo ago
  My guess is you are deleting the word each time. Unlike the FUTO keyboard, the iPhone keyboard will give you different results each time after you delete because it assumes that if you delete a word, it’s probably because the autocomplete got it wrong, so it gives you a different result on the next try. A workaround is to use the Notes app and use the return key to make a new line after each try, rather than deleting. That should give you more consistent results.
3RTB297 4mo ago
It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago. So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit. I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.
sublinear 4mo ago
I just horizontally backtrack my finger over the double letter. Easier to do and produces the same result.

growt 4mo ago

I wouldn't mind if similar _common_ words are mixed up. But the current state of the iOS keyboard and also gBoard is that it sometimes just makes really unhinged suggestions (at least in my native german). Words I never used before and that I didn't even know existed. I think a small AI layer on top would probably fix that, just the likelihood of next words multiplied somehow with what I possible could have swiped.

indigo945 4mo ago
In German, it's also extremely annoying that even common compound words will not be suggested. Google Keyboard has somewhat improved here, but FUTO Keyboard still drops the ball on this completely.
- morsch 4mo ago
  What'd be nice for compound words particularly in German is a way to enter them separately and have them merge either automatically or as an option above the keyboard. Eg enter Bürger Dienste and have it autocorrect to Bürgerdienste. Or even Führung Kraft and turn it into Führungskraft (inserting an s).
puttycat 4mo ago
My guess is that an AI layer already present _is_ the reason you're seeing these unhinged suggestions. Earlier generation iOS keyboards were much more accurate and reasonable.

pbhjpbhj 4mo ago

Correction seems so mutton handed - I don't understand why, when I position the cursor for a correction it doesn't stem/postfix the word to offer options. In fact (with Gboard) the suggestions don't change with cursor position. Surely, when I place the cursor you the right of a letter I'm planning on removing that letter, or adding a letter, but the suggestions don't change according to cursor placement. There's also no apparent frecency - I had to correct cursor every time. I swiped "frecency" as "decency" - corrections offered were "d doubt difference". The swipes for those are wildly different. d->e is NNW (350°), d->i, d->o is ENE (~70°). It's really so basic. Surely they can do better than this.

a022311 4mo ago

Back when I was using QWERTY with Microsoft SwiftKey, I used to swipe a bit, but it never really felt comfortable for me. I've tried swiping again after switching to Colemak on my phone and everything is so close together that the accuracy is very low. I wonder if this model will help improve accuracy on other layouts too (or even languages!). I hope FUTO does start caring about language support, because for example their AI powered text prediction is only available for English. I'd happily train a model for them in my native language if they provided instructions on how to do so. And I'd help with swipe typing too.

WillAdams 4mo ago

Have you ever tried: http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html http://networkimprov.net/alphatap/light.html It was set up for just this. c.f., the opensource research project Dasher https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/ https://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/

whalabi 4mo ago

Same. I don't think I have many words that get misinterpreted at all, though pretty almost always does (as pet).

mbirth 4mo ago

Back during my Palm Pilot days I’ve discovered the FITALY layout - optimised for pen input and one-finger typing. But it should work similarly efficient for swiping as the goal was to minimise travel between letters (in the English language). http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm http://www.fitaly.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm However, there’s no Fitaly keyboard available for modern phone OSes.