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Comment by rsaarelm | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the post. I had also been using MessagEase for years and was blindsided by the popup and confused how there's almost nothing about it online. So now I'm googling for messagease stuff from the last week and found my way here, I guess this thread is buried and invisible on actual HN.

I jumped over to thumb-key for now and am treating the brain-breakage as just some healthy neuroplasticity exercise since I'm not very serious about mobile typing.

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I was looking into thumb-key. What differences are there? I noticed the same layout is available

1. Thumb-key intentionally doesn't support gestures other than basic taps and swipes. MessagEase uses these quite heavily for "borrowing" keys from other layers without having to switch to them.

2. Thumb-key bakes a lot of decisions into the layout. If you're a pure english-speaker then you tend to have a decent variety of layouts available, but as a swede, having to choose between having Å/Ä/Ö available, having convenient access to special symbols, or having convenient access to numbers is a bit of a non-starter, especially when there is no actual conflict in the layout.

As also a swede I find some keys are forgotten in the swedish layout. The letters aren't in our alphabet but that does not mean we don't use ü, é, à and such. And I find no way of doing dead keys in Thumb-key. Maybe there will be more donations to fuel some additions to Thumb-key now thanks to MessagEase sudden rentseeking.

Will definitely donate, I'm not pro subscription. Especially not this way, locking in users by waiting for them to learn your keyboard layout and then lock the keyboard behind a paywall.

I realized I had an old apk installed and grabbed the newest thumb-key from the site, and it does indeed have a ME-compatible layout now so I don't need to relearn everything. Not having gesture-based capitalization still irks me though.

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