Thumb-Key

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About

Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.

It features a 3x3 grid layout, as many older phones had, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Initial testing shows that you can reach ~25 words per minute after a day of use.

Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.

As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to appromixate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.

This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) MessageEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.

founded 2 years ago
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I am in love with thumbkey rn but my only grievance is that when I accidently swipe up on the space key it moves my cursor up a line and messes up my whole flow. I thought I saw that this function was removed in a previous version but my app is up to date and it still happens. Is there a secret setting I can't find?

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I want to add a comma to the letter, but I don't know how I can do it(english layout).

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Thumbkey is a great project for me. But I think that the issue of creating keyboards and variants should be more controlled perhaps by the creator. There are so many variants that it can be confusing at times. Who tells me that the Spanish version of Thumbkey that has moved keys over the original version is the correct one or even the original would not be better just adding the necessary diacritics and the ñ. Many may tell me: "Well, you create your variant and that's it," but with that there would only be another variant to confuse a new person who arrives. Perhaps over time a way to modify your keyboards locally could be added and perhaps share them if someone likes it similar to how 8vim does. But perhaps having every opinion on how the key layout should be in the official version as part of the official application is not the best idea.

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Thumb-key is great! Thanks for an open source alternative to messagease. One question I have - what is the reason for requiring internet permission? Is it possible to build the apk without this?

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I have been using MessagEase for a pretty long while now and it was a great choice for polyglots like me because I could handle all my 11 languages on one keyboard. Unfortunately Thumbkey doesn't have that on the fly flexibility yet. Options like ad hoc adding letters and a compose key and combining diacritics are vital for me. Happy to help to implement this, otherwise I might even fork and rework if I find the energy...

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