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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I'm less and less convinced that a handheld keyboard can really be justified if you want to do some linux or programming stuff on such a device.

Touch screens can be simple enough if you get used to them, they save a lot of space on the device and I think they are cheaper than a keyboard.

Touch-swipe features will also make things much, much easier on a touch keyboard, and I'm sure it's totally possible to add linux commands or programming keywords to a swipe dictionary.

Touch keyboards can also have their layouts changed.

Other thing to consider if you're typing code, it would be nice to introduce more autocomplete to make things easier.

In the end if you really want to type, just get a real keyboard and sit down at a table. I'd also rather buy a well-made handheld keyboard that you attach to a device, but sadly I can't find one that is worth it.

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As someone who loved his Nokia N900 with Emacs running on it, a physical keyboard was vital to being able to have that efficient and powerful workflow. Emacs’ keybindings are already part of my muscle memory from my desktop computer, and it was nice to be able to draw on that on my phone, without having to learn a whole new touch-based workflow.

> Touch keyboards can also have their layouts changed.

So could the N900’s physical keyboard. I work in multiple languages and need ready access to a lot of diacritics, and I was able to create my own perfect keyboard layout since the N900 ran X and so could handle an ordinary Xmodmap file.

People often claim that touch keyboards are fine and just as efficient, if not more so. But the decline of longform text on the internet seems to coincide with the arrival of smartphones with touch keyboards as most people’s default computing device.

"Soft" keyboards on a touchscreen have a number of disadvantages, the biggest for me is that they take up a large part of the screen. I could use the terminal or edit source code just fine on my phone's screen, but only if at least 40% of it wasn't taken up by a keyboard. Secondly, I think you're underestimating the number of "weird" sequences of characters programmers and terminal users regularly type.

Sure, a proper keyboard and a table is always better, but there are often situations where such a comfort isn't available.

But a hardware keyboard takes up a lot of potential screen space, even when it's not in use.

This doesn't apply to devices which have slide-out keyboards or a clamshell design. The linked design is more "Blackberry-style" as far as I can tell, but those are not the devices I primarily had in mind.

There's also stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard

Those are sweet, but suffer from many of the issues of touchscreen keyboards (no tactile feedback, no ability to feel the keys blindly).

EDIT: But to be clear, they are great at having a full-size keyboard that takes up no screen space. Tradeoffs.

This is why I pre ordered the Fxtec Pro1, a landscape slider android phone with microsd card and FM radio. Oh, and yes it does have the increasingly mythical headphone jack.

I suppose you could step away from the traditional keyboard and get something like a twiddler[0]?

[0] https://twiddler.tekgear.com/

IME, touch screens are simply way too error-prone for any sort of serious work. You can make them work, but only by adding a "swipe to confirm this input" step for any potentially-destructive activity. (AOSP "recovery" environments do have this, for a reason!) Current command-line environments are not well setup for this, but you could make this work in combination with a "web"-like interface (especially if designed around REST principles).

Psst blackberry key two with termux running a REPL

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