[crazygringo]

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%.

[nulld3v]

FUTO Swipe supports ClearFlow, which is exactly what you are talking about, a keyboard layout optimized for swiping: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/

https://github.com/futo-org/futo-keyboard-layouts/issues/163

[snthpy]

I switched to ClearFlow a month or two ago after learning of it on Hackernews. It is available in GBoard.

I'm happy with the switch. Like any keyboard switch (I've gone from Qwerty to Dvorak and now a Colemak-dh derivative with about ten years on each) it takes some time to learn the layout. Overall I'm happy with it though and there are less frustrating misinterpretations and corrections needed.

This post was swiped on it with only two corrections and the second one was my fault as i misremembered a key location.

[ggeorgovassilis]

If you don't mind, how do I get ClearFlow in gboard? GBoard on Android only has language selections, not keyboard selections.

[helenite]

There's a section [1] on the page that has instructions, and video [2] too. I had to select the English (US) language to get the option to select ClearFlow.

[1]: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/#section_activate [2]: https://youtu.be/rSfbvE9cEKE?si=NbJC93sTiOHqw4lX

[ggeorgovassilis]

Thanks. It's available only for the US layout, not UK.

I'm writing down a few impressions: - the layout is unusual, but I get the motivation. Distances are minimised and letters are arranged so that ambiguity is removed. - although I'm very slow, I haven't made a single mistake so far. Clearflow allows me to swipe much more accurately than stock gboard. - the square keyboard layout unfortunately means that half the letters are constantly hidden behind my thumb. As I'm unfamiliar with the layout, this means that before swiping a word, I have to look at the layout, memorise letter locations and plan the movement - since I write in multiple languages and Clearflow is available in only one of them, I would have to memorise a completely new layout for a language I write in only half the time.

[snthpy]

Hi, Yes I'm in the same boat as you - had to switch to US language instead of UK. I've been addiing the anglisised versions of words to my dictionary as I go along so it's becoming less of an issue over time. Maybe I'll switch to FUTO in order to not have to deal with this anymore. Gboard has one nice feature though in that I have multiple languages enabled so I get correct predictive completion in non-English languages.

For learning ClearFlow, I used the Games app available from the "Clearflow Games" section on their website: https://clearflowkeyboard.github.io/

I also have the issue of the thumb getting in the way so I spent a couple of days playing the games to get my layout memory up and then it became usable without frustration and I'm not looking back now although I occasionally still forget the odd letter location.

[nisiddharth]

Tap on the language, a scrollable list of layouts comes on top.

[ggeorgovassilis]

I learned something. Thank you

[Conscat]

I have been a ClearFlow user for over a year now. Generally I like it, but there absolutely are still common words that are hard to input consistently. The THEA cluster has given me no shortage of problems. Still a fan though.

[neves]

Does It work for non English languages?

[crazygringo]

Thank you! That's amazing. I had no idea!

It's one of those things I've been wanting for a decade now, sounds like it's been around for about a year and a half.

Man, this is the kind of stuff I come to HN for.

EDIT: Ugh! I have an iPhone, and FUTO is Android-only, and ClearFlow is only available in the Android Gboard, not the iOS Gboard. :(

[tecleandor]

I'd like to know where did they get the stats ClearFlow mentions in their site (reducing backspace corrections by 37.5% and shortening finger gliding distance by 41.6%.) and see what method did they use to analyze those swipe patterns and create .

It could be interesting for applying it to different languages (or modified word corpus).

[resonious]

This is interesting. Though it doesn't seem like it'd translate well to a physical keyboard, leaving me with two different layouts to work with.

Maybe I'm mistaken though. Are there any physical clearflow keyboards? Are they any good, or does clearflow really only work well with swipe?

[joshuat]

Using a physical clearflow keyboard sounds like a nightmare - they're just designed for very different input models

[_thisdot]

The thumb typing muscle memory does not translate to finger typing at all. Most Dvorak or Colemak users are comfortable using QWERTY on their phones. Clearflow really only works well with swipe.

[duskdozer]

No, not muscle memory, but at least the idea of knowing where keys are. I'd bet that non-qwerty typers mostly started with qwerty and possibly still need to use it on some occasions, so they remember.

[_thisdot]

I can't speak for everyone but I did an experiment to see if this was the case (I actually just wanted to switch to Colemak everywhere. But iOS doesn't support it natively and third party keyboard landscape is pretty bleak on iOS). I switched to Dvorak on my phone and got really comfortable with it. I was already comfortable with Colemak on my computer. Then I tried

1. Switching to Dvorak on my computer AND 2. Switching to Colemak on my phone

I already had a feeling that my Dvorak experience on phone wasn't gonna help typing in a physical keyboard and indeed that was the case. But also, the physical keyboard experience with Colemak didn't really help with thumb typing/swiping on the phone. On a physical keyboard, I can only type QWERTY at around 30WPM and Colemak at around 130WPM. However, on the phone QWERTY is my strongest layout (even when I can only type at around 50WPM with it).

Then there's the design philosophy. Colemak aggressively keeps the most used letters on the homerow. Paste a random Wikipedia article into this page and you'll see (https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/ alternatively, here's the heatmap for the introduction to today's featured article about Augustus: https://postimg.cc/9RT8P4N6). On a phone this means that a lot of the times you'll be swiping back and forth horizontally. Resulting in identical swipe paths for a lot of common words.

And if Clearflow was ported to a physical keyboard, most of your fingers won't be doing any work and the active fingers will be doing weird tap dance. The position of spacebar (undoubtedly the most used key on the keyboard) to the sides where you'd be using your pinky would make it an RSI machine.

My point is that if you're comfortable with QWERTY on the phone, that's not because you're comfortable with QWERTY on the desktop. That's because you got used to QWERTY on the phone.

[a022311]

I'm using Colemak on my phone, but can't get used to it on my desktop, so I'm stuck with QWERTY! :D

[functionmouse]

interesting, tying this. thanks

[deepsquirrelnet]

> 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]

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]

From 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.

[soco]

So it would need one model per language? Not impossible (for me)...

[sholladay]

> 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.

[3RTB297]

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]

I just horizontally backtrack my finger over the double letter. Easier to do and produces the same result.

[aidenn0]

FWIW, I just switched to FUTO yesterday and (out of the box at least) it doesn't support this. With gboard, that works great, but with FUTO it does not.

I looked in the "Swipe Typing" options and there doesn't seem to be a config for it.

[saimiam]

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]

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.

[growt]

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.

[puttycat]

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.

[indigo945]

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]

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).

[jaggederest]

Blast from the past here for you, probably not relevant any more, but a cool reimagining of gesture interfaces:

https://www.the8pen.com/

Edit: apparently there's a modern successor? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.flide.vi8

[JdeBP]

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

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]

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]

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]

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.

[horsawlarway]

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]

I should have guessed. Of course someone has done this. (-:

* https://github.com/sspanak/tt9

[pbhjpbhj]

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]

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.

[mbirth]

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

However, there’s no Fitaly keyboard available for modern phone OSes.

[WillAdams]

Have you ever tried:

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/

[Velocifyer]

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.

[whalabi]

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