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by grishka 1066 days ago
To be honest, I'm just somehow incompatible with touchscreen text input regardless of the screen size. It works 90% of the time, sure, but the remaining 10% I want to yeet the damn thing at a wall for repeatedly failing to read my mind. This is especially exacerbated when I'm typing in Russian — which I do much more than in English — where each word can have one of something like 30 different suffixes depending on the context it's used in. Computers are quite good at applying formal rules to input data, yet somehow, no touchscreen keyboard does this. You added a word to the dictionary? Too bad, that's the one form that won't be autocorrected, now add all the remaining ones.

No one seems to question whether a qwerty keyboard is a good fit for this. Everyone somehow accepts that as the only way. But in reality, it doesn't pass even the slightest scrutiny. It's qwerty because that's the layout most people are familiar with from computer keyboards. It's not optimized to take advantage of the touchscreen hardware. Instead, it's a layout that works beautifully for full hands, crammed into a screen where you have use it with just two thumbs that often miss the tiny keys.

I tried to rethink touchscreen text input once[1] but this prototype ended up having such a steep learning curve that even I myself switched back to qwerty. I might try it again sometime in the future but I'm also open to ideas.

[1] https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1517431598857302019

1 comments

have you tried 8pen/8vim, it looks like it makes more sense than qwerty for the small screen, though, it has a bit of a learning curve. Also, I know that for japanese, you have those 12 key keyboards, where holding down while dragging up, down, left, or right, means different characters. I think that could work for other languages as well.
> I think that could work for other languages as well.

That was exactly what I built for Russian and English, see my linked thread. It ended up not working as well as I imagined. Maybe I should be smarter with the layout instead of making it alphabetical.

> 8pen/8vim

Neither of them support Russian :(

8vim does have a Ukrainian layout file but while similar, there are some letters that Russian has but Ukrainian lacks (ы э ъ ё). Though I suppose I can make a pull request.

edit: I installed and tried 8vim. While a nice idea and I can see myself using it, this whole layers thing does kinda ruin it and you do need layers for a Cyrillic alphabet if you also want to have punctuation. 8vim also lacks the ability to quickly switch languages.

You might want to try out MessagEase, which is a flick syle keyboard like the Japanese ones mentioned above.

There's room for a lot of punctuation on the same layer as the alphabet, plus support for ctrl/alt/F-keys. I find it great for working with ssh.