this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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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.

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I used to use the MessagEase keyboard and I would like to add two features:

  1. Swipe "there and back" to select another character
  2. Swipe off and back diagonally on the spacebar to engage Ctrl and/or Alt

Unfortunately, I don't know much about coding this kind of thing. How would I even do it?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its a choice to only support explicit simple swipes, rather than having "hidden" functionality. There are some programmers layouts that have those keys IIRC, or you could make a new layout with those.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks, I'll look at it

For curiosity's sake, I am still wondering how a more complicated swipe gesture would be possible.