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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Too much variants of thumb keyboard (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Thumb key started with a pretty small amount of layouts. While creating a variant and PRing it might not be the cleanest solution, it definitely works. There have even been rejected open PRs adding in-app layout customizaiton (to some degree), and they were rejected mainly due to unnecessary complexity.

Here are my few main reasons I think the current system is fine:

One of the only major downsides is that a new user might have a harder time finding the appropriate keyboard layout. However, if somebody is installing thumb-key, there's a 99% chance they're either a former MessagEase user (in which case they just select the MessagEase layout and continue with their life) or a curious person who is willing to experiment with a weird keyboard like this and try out 4 or 5 different layouts they find interesting. There are some ongoing discussions in the issues about a better naming scheme for the layouts, so new users can distinguish them better.
Implementing a in-app layout modification system with good UX would be very time consuming, and the developer's main project is working on lemmy and the Jerboa app - I imagine there isn't really that much time left to sink in hours for such a big feature. Most, if not all "bigger" features like slide gestures were several PRs from several differennt people, sometimes over the span of months.
Creating and maintaining your layout isn't that hard - it can even be done without android studio, and in 1-3-ish iterations over the course of a week or two you get a layout that you are likely to use for a long time (at least, that's how it was for me). Dessalines is, in my opinion, exceptionally quick in merging PRs and making new releases, so it's really not that bad.