Unexpected Keyboard | Hacker News Reader

Unexpected Keyboard

github.com

270 pointstwoquestions148 comments

I used to have a phone with a physical keyboard that had a ctrl key. I can't live without ctrl-z, ctrl-v, etc. This keyboard made it possible to go to a fully-touchscreen phone without being too miserable!

(Although some level of misery is hard to get out of with only a touchscreen.)

I have used this keyboard for over a year now I think and it's really good.

I have never felt the loss of ctrl+key combinations on my phone. For what do you use these things? For example, if I'm already using my finger to select text, I can just long press to copy.

But I'm not selecting with gestures! I press ctrl-a most of the time. Then I might adjust with shift-space-swipe, much like I would with arrow keys on a physical keyboard.

I hate long pressing. It's so slow and imprecise.

Ctrl-z to undo is an action usually not available from the context menu or elsewhere.

Oh and pressing ctrl-d to send EOF in a subshell in Termux is much more convenient than typing "exit" or whatever.

On iOS there was at least at some point a "shake to undo" or a 3 fingered swipe I could never get to trigger, infuriating, I just live without undo now.

On recent iOS versions, you can tap the screen with 3 fingers to get a popup that has 3 options (undo, copy, and paste IIRC).

Nice to know! I’m used to having to vigorously shake my phone for undo. And for it randomly popping on when i pull it from a pocket…

The 3 finger tap is infuriatingly hard to trigger for me since if you don’t sync your fingers’ taps perfectly, you’re tapping random elements on the screen, potentially doing something bad, like saving/sending out the bad change, that you were trying to undo. A single triple-tap would have been better, but also there is a full SQUARE INCH of wasted space below the iOS keyboard on current phones. Idk why they can’t make use of some of it to open a cut/copy/paste/undo menu, or heck, add command and control keys too!

What? When?

can you explain more about ctrl+d?

It sends the End Of File character. In most terminal applications, this ends an interactive session. E.g. if you're in a Python REPL and are done with it, you can press Ctrl-D and it will close and return to Bash. Press Ctrl-D once more and Bash will exit as well (and in most cases the terminal emulator will then close, too).

So, just a conventional shortcut to close things.

how is it different from ctrl+c ?

Ctrl-C sends the SIGINT signal instead. It can be handled, too, and by default it will terminate the program. Semantics are a little different: you use Ctrl-D when the app expects input, and Ctrl-C when it's actively doing something and you want to interrupt it.

For example, in Python REPL, you can press ^C to interrupt a running piece of code:

    >>> while True:
    ...     pass
    ... 
    ^CTraceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    KeyboardInterrupt

You can't however exit the REPL with ^C:

    >>> (^C)
    KeyboardInterrupt

But if you press ^D it exits just fine.

Ruby's irb works the same (and of course Bash/zsh do, too). In Node.js, ^D works right away, and ^C first triggers a warning but you can press it the second time to exit.

The Select -> touch to copy is a miserable interaction to me.

Selecting the appropriate text is already a challenge in so many circumstances. Having to tap again exactly inside the selection, then choose from the floating menu are two more failure points and interaction lag.

It's especially painful when trying to select single characters (which happens a lot in CJK land).

I wish I could join the GBoard team for two weeks, just add an optional ctrl key, and quit.

PS: Actually, mapping the physical Volume Up to Copy, Volume Down to Paste whenever there's no media playing or some other condition could be the best choice.

This is probably irrelevant to you, but the Samsung keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy tablet has a control key. I love that keyboard. It’s been too long since I had a Samsung phone to know if it has an option for that too. It does have a number row option too, something I deeply resent not having an option for on iOS.

> … the Samsung keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy tablet has a control key. … It’s been too long since I had a Samsung phone to know if it has an option for that too.

I just tried on a Galaxy A54, and don't see such an option.

Finger text selection is really clumsy and error prone, and copypasting is even worse.

One word, emacs ;)

Interesting. I've been using the Hacker's Keyboard with Termux, but it doesn't seem to have received any updates in a long time. (I'm fine with programs being considered complete, but I also realize that Android is unfortunately a moving target.)

Has anyone used both and could compare them?

I've used both, though I'm not sure I can compare them directly, since it has been a year or more since I switched from Hacker's Keyboard.

Unexpected Keyboard works well for me when using Termux, possibly even better than Hacker's Keyboard, since I find it easier to swipe on a key to get to uncommonly-used symbols rather than switching to a different keyboard layer. Every now and then I accidentally swipe a key when I meant to press it, and end up entering a accented character when I didn't mean to, but this is fairly rare. I don't use Termux very often, but for occasional vim or terminal usage it's totally sufficient.

One cool feature of Unexpected Keyboard (which may be available elsewhere, I haven't looked at many others) is that you can swipe left and right on the space bar to quickly and accurately scroll left and right in a text field. I find this about as fast as tapping at a position in a text field, but much more accurate.

> One cool feature of Unexpected Keyboard (which may be available elsewhere, I haven't looked at many others) is that you can swipe left and right on the space bar to quickly and accurately scroll left and right in a text field.

Nice! That's a feature of Google's GBoard, which ships as the default on Pixels but is available to most Android phones. I use it extremely often (including twice while writing this comment) and not having it is one of the big reasons I found Hacker Keyboard frustrating. Hearing that Unexpected Keyboard has it is pushing me over the edge to give it a trial run.

Does GBoard allow you to select text by pressing shift and then swiping on space?

I just found out I can do it on iphone thanks to your comment. Wow.

Gboard's implementation is super annoying for me because it keeps trying to skip over word boundaries, and it's quite difficult to move just one or two characters over, because it waits for you to swipe far enough before activating any movement. Just awful.

> Gboard's implementation is super annoying for me because it keeps trying to skip over word boundaries, and it's quite difficult to move just one or two characters over, because it waits for you to swipe far enough before activating any movement. Just awful.

This is interesting—Gboard also by default uses a long-press on the space bar to change keyboards, so I often find myself triggering that while meaning to scroll (or, more often, meaning to long press 'n' for '!'), but, as long as I'm quick enough, I've never observed it to be hesitant about moving one or two characters.

One hugely underated offering of unexpected keyboard is the ease with which you can define entierly new keyboards. Want a keyboard for futhark runes? They're unicode so go for it, you totally can. Like thorn as a concept and a character, and want to use it with ease? þen add it for easy use. This keyboard is truly the hackers keyboard. I spent a month using termux exclusively, writing cli apps for things as i needed them and without unexpected keyboard that would have been a really painful experience, rather than mildly inconveniant at times.

Apologies for pedantry: in ðat case you should have used Þ U+00DE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN, as it begins a sentence.

This is what I come to HN for

Fantastic addition, no appologies neccesary.

> is that you can swipe left and right on the space bar to quickly and accurately scroll left and right in a text field. I find this about as fast as tapping at a position in a text field, but much more accurate

I recently learned about a hidden iphone feature. If you hold the spacebar for about halve a second you can move freely the cursor around any text field.

I used Hacker's keyboard for years before moving over to unexpected keyboard for any terminal work done via phone. Unexpected keyboard gives easier access to symbols and has slightly larger keys (less keys on the main layer) than Hacker's keyboard.

I still use Gboard for my main keyboard, but looking for replacement suggestions that have a good swipe to text

Yes, jesus, swipe to text! It's 21st century! Why can't they make it recognize various basic words in the three languages I use?

Google seems to have forgotten how to do it well, to be fair. It's one of the lost arts of the ancient civilization of ~2019

FUTO Keyboard comes to mind: https://keyboard.futo.org/

Swipe worked pretty well but I had some problems (perhaps switching languages or something? can't remember) so I switched back to plain AOSP keyboard for now.

I started with Hacker's Keyboard and moved to Unexpected because Hacker's stopped working on newer Android devices. It's not a 1:1 replacement, but it works really well once you get used to it, and it also works as a decent general purpose keyboard.

Unexpected Keyboard allows you to create your own keyboard layouts so I prefer it.

Is there a keyboard that uses GPT-2 or some other such LLM to predict what I'm trying to write? SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys and it always writes the right thing, but it's fairly abandoned with a few perplexing bugs.

I'd love to find a maintained keyboard that can predict as well as SwiftKey, and has all the other "simple" niceties SwiftKey has on Android (second layer with long press, configurable durations, customizable keys, emoji search, etc).

[FUTO Keyboard](https://keyboard.futo.org/) uses a local LLM for suggestions and corrections.

Thank you!

I like the idea of their keyboard a lot, but I wish they didn't use that license.

I don't like it either. I'm glad they started calling it Source First™ instead of incorrectly calling it open source though.

I use it, it is not very good, ie. it is pretty bad in terms of predictions. Love the mission and everything, just prediction is bad.

I thought once it learns it will be better, but it's been months..

FUTO is mediocre with swiping and predictions in my experience, but the 70M parameter voice model is stunningly good at 30-second voice to text. It has completely changed how I think about using my phone to draft prose - my first drafts are now often from my phone, snippets collected in moments when it occurs to me on-the-fly. It's been a really significant shift in the utility of my phone, and because it's installable through F-Droid, I have it on my Amazon tablet, and Boox reader. It's worked really well across all of them.

Have you tried it recently? Their predictions/corrections were great for me.

Ive been using it exclusively for months, and while I do like it, I ended up turning off predictions because of how bad they were. The swipe typing feature is also pretty bad, which is my biggest gripe with it since I love typing like that.

Yeah, it's choosing extremely esoteric words for me, and clearly missing the beginning of many swipes (despite drawing the trail correctly). Almost unusably bad swiping imo.

E.g. "so" with a nearly prefect straight line clearly drawn within both keys -> it chose "SSSI". What even is that? Or "drawn" there chose "Den", which is apparently a proper noun because ("cause") I didn't ("Ivy") hit shift.

They are aware of that, that's why they recently decided to create their own swiping dataset. As of today they have not released the updated swiping functions after training it again but it's in the pipelines and I'm really excited for it.

I must thank you for the recommendation. Works offline, not cluttered, good defaults, plenty of options and some clever one, voice input and prediction both work well for me, no subscription but instead you can buy a lifetime license to support them. Also it looks good and responsive. I love it.

> Is there a keyboard that uses GPT-2 or some other such LLM to predict what I'm trying to write? SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys

You don't need GPT for that, you need a dictionary lookup and some stats on how the keyboard is used. See how Ken Kocienda implemented the original virtual keyboard for iOS: https://hiddenheroes.netguru.com/hurst-han-kocienda Scroll down to "But as promising as the Purple interface was, the software suffered from a potentially fatal flaw: it was impossible to use a virtual keyboard on a phone-sized screen. "

Well, I know I don't need it, but it's still nice. I'm writing this with FUTO right now, and it's fantastic, it's correcting all my little mistypes to the exact right thing.

The keyboard with the best prediction and self learning was my (first smartphone) Sony Xperia Z5 from 2015. I only realized it was a Sony specific app later in life. (I didn't understand auto correction memes until I got a work phone with a google keyboard.) Sadly they don't offer it as a stand alone app. I would pay for it.

I have settled for FUTO Keyboard for now. Bevor that I used SwiftKey. (The Sony is still the only one where I did see contextual self-learning/prediction.)

The only thing I really want is a keyboard that doesn't think I'm trying to type "Ava" all the time I'm typing "and". Dictionary removal would be just great. I don't ever intend to type "Ava". It has been my intention exactly Zero times.

I get the same with SwiftKey, it tries to replace "my" with "NY", which I never ever mean. FUTO has a blacklist, at least. I'm going to switch back to Android just for the keyboards.

That and 'Mr' when I try to type 'me.' It's so frustrating. If I ever mean to type either Mr or NY, I'll do it myself!

Do you by chance have a contact named Ava in your address book? If so you can try changing their name, or disabling the option to provide auto complete suggestions from your address book

No. I know nobody with that name. The only time it is in my record is the dozens of times the phone wrongly guessed that's what I was trying to do and I sent it.

Just a slight, tiny, grammatical parser would fix this. Nothing heavy. Just a look behind parser

You just did! Twice!

Apparently the iPhone predictions literally do use GPT-2, or at least a model based on it:

https://jackcook.com/2023/09/08/predictive-text.html

It’s too bad that its swiping performance is so shockingly bad. I cannot ever get it to swipe the word you without tapping a correction from the gray bar. The mandatory way it interprets swiping to those 3 letters, no matter how precise, is always turned into “your.”

I hate the iOS keyboard situation so much. Third party ones either crash and dump you randomly on the Apple one, or they have their own frustrating bugs. And the Apple one is of course more stable (or maybe just relaunches so fast nobody knows when it crashes) but it is ruined by its lack of a number row (or any other options) as well as bugs like the above.

You you you I am swiping you.

That’s funny. It works fine for me. Although swiping comes out as “sweeping”.

yeah no amount of resetting keyboard settings or anything else can change that for me. I've seen others that can swipe 'you.' :/

Maybe Apple would suggest that I take 2-3 days to fully dedicate to re-setting-up from scratch. Or maybe I'd do that and find that some corrupt entry in an iCloud-synced database was responsible and I would also need a fresh Apple ID.

> SwiftKey is amazing because I can tap in the general vicinity of keys and it always writes the right thing

Not my experience at all. Been using it for 10 years, whenever I manage to write a 10 word sentence without needing to correct anything I feel like i just won the lottery.

it's always so strange to see people on the opposite side of precision spectrum

I disable auto-correct and word suggestions, always get annoyed by "drag around and find out what your mistap gave you!" features - and here I read someone _dreaming_ about "general vicinity" understand-er

fascinating

Great idea to allow multiple symbols per key, though it's not worth losing swipe over, so these should be behind a longer key press (hold for .5 sec then swipe to the corner ) or a double tap Is they any keyboard that combines those and is also customizable?

The numbers should also be in a numpad layout, unfortunately common mistake even in custom keyboards

Also some keys in good central positions like sdf are surprising empty, could reduce the overload of other keys by shifting some symbols there

Wonder how convenient corner gestures are vs pure horizontal/vertical

Some of us don't use swipe, this is great for me

I actually think swipe user is a minority ? I have never seen a swipe user in my circle but given how much people talk about it online, it must be quite popular in the US at least.

I don't mean the App, I mean the action

Swipe isn't a good fit for terminal input, which is the usecase for this keyboard.

Why not? Swiping is less error prone, might need a different dictionary, though, to better match common commands and other patterns.

150ms, not 500. Try it. Gboard already has this built in. Feels very snappy if you do it this way. And you don't give up swipe nor tapping.

You can create your own keyboard layouts in this app.

There is a numpad, quite nice. Ctrl key to bottom right.

Not a separate numpad, but numbers on the same layer. Horizontal 1234567890 is bad

See MessagEase for a similar keyboard (not programmer-focused) with less keys but letting you use the swiping motion to type ordinary — great for fat-fingered people.

In a similar category we find also GKOS (uses chording to get the corner symbols) and I will always have a soft spot for KeyBee.

https://entropicthoughts.com/rethinking-text-input-on-touchs...

I'd call MessagEase-style keyboards good for programming too - no (need for) autocorrect, and the extra room lets you squeeze in most symbols and modifiers.

Or Thumb-key, an open-source take on that.

How long does it take to learn https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key ?

Is it like retraining yourself to use Dvorak? Or more like learning the Palm strokes?

I switched to dvorak a few years ago and to thumb-key this year. I would say that thumb-key is much easier to learn than dvorak. I simply switched to it and about three months later, I realized I had gotten up to almost my original typing speed without any directed effort. I originally typed at 45 wpm on AnySoftKeyboard, and now I type at 40 wpm on thumb-key. This is in contrast to dvorak, which took six months of at least 15mins a day of dedicated practice time to surpass my original speed.

Did you continue to use Qwerty for work? I was in the fortunate position of switching to Colemak at a fairly non-critical time of life, so I cold turkeyed it.

Took about two weeks of daily driving until it was no longer painful, then three months until I had matched Qwerty speed. So probably similar to your thumb-key experience.

Faster than Dvorak. Unlike switching from fluent QWERTY to an initially slow other-layout, you're switching from the frustrating autocorrupt to something deterministic and predictable.

I picked it up to a usable speed within two days, helped by the fact that I use a lot of technical terms that autocorrect used to dismantle, so the baseline was much worse.

> frustrating autocorrupt

Look — I don't know if it was on purpose, but I chuckled.

I'd argue FlickBoard is closer, but I'm probably very biased!

I'll try it.

edit: I tried it and I already like it better.

Thumb-key also has many alternate layouts, including clones of MessageEase layouts. However, MessageEase layouts are easier to edit: directly on device, instead of via pull-request.

Oh that looks cool! I was really hoping it would have better emoji support than MessagEase as that is the one think I miss (the ability to search for emoji by name) but alas no.

See also FITALY[1] which was amazing on the Pocket PCs but has sadly (criminally) not made it to being an iOS keyboard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITALY

Generally I feel keyboards on iOS are almost non-existent, especially combined with App Store's (lack of) discoverability. A simple search for keyboard brings up only GBoard and Microsoft's. And emoji and Unicode "fancy characters" keyboards. The only new keyboard I found today, thanks to this thread is called "AEI Keyboard".

I actually want to get around making something customisable. A keyboard that you will put whatever keys you want, wherever you want. iPhone is too small for a comfortable keyboard, otherwise.

I've learned MessageEase, and it's great for that feeling of having a direct connection to what you're typing (no mistakes, and no annoying autocorrect messing you up), but I always found it slower than swipe-typing

MessagEase has been my go-to for years. I swapped this year to thumb-key when MessagEase went to a subscription.

I love the ability to quickly copy, paste, select-all, type special characters, etc., all without having to do anything complicated. It took me a little bit of time to get used to the layout, but now I type exactly what I want, as I want it, without any auto-correct or automation needed. I make few errors and love the whole way of doing it. QWERTY makes very little sense on such a small screen, but it's what people know.

Calculator++ is lovely, i like how it works. These swiping buttons especially usefull on small-ish screens.

P.S. tried keyboard, should work wery well with termux. Did not figure out how to swith to next language. Custom keys, yay!

where's the link to Calculator++ ?

It's listed as a "similar app" in the README. I think it has a similar feature where you can swipe on keyboard keys to type different characters.

> Did not figure out how to swith to next language

1. Select the needed ones in the settings

1. Swipe up on the space bar

Swipe on specebar = cursor movement, which is useful

Edit: manually added languages again in settings and "swipe up" action appear

I use keyboard with similar concept as this for more than 10 years. It uses a 3 by 3 key with additional column for control so like an old phone but swipe based. I like it because I can use 1 hand to write on phone. The application called MessageEase[0] before they go subscription based and now I use Thumb-Key[1].

[0] https://www.exideas.com/ME/ [1] https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

I've been using this for a couple years now and it's been fantastic. Just the Compose Key support alone is a godsend. The swiping takes some getting used to, but with practice it now feels second-nature.

Do you not need astonishing precision to not make any mistakes?

I don't feel like I make more mistakes than I typically do with any other smartphone keyboard. One particularly annoying mistake I make all the time is hitting backspace when I meant to hit a character near it, but that was always a problem with other keyboards and my fat thumbs, too.

This was...unexpected...

Unexpectedly good. I am definitely going to relearn typing on my phone just to use this.

I have been using this for a few years now. Has all the keys I could want. Actually makes ssh-ing from termux not a bad experience.

My mom (not a programmer) uses it as well because she is able to type much faster with the swiping than with a regular touch keyboard.

Does anyone else remember the "TouchPal" keyboard on Windows Mobile?

It was similar in some ways.

https://i0.wp.com/farm3.static.flickr.com/2142/1622925926_3a...

QW and a symbol were all on one key in a T shaped layout - Q top left, W top right, symbol below, you could just hit the key as-is and let predictive text/auto-correct do it's thing (badly, at the time).

The more interesting way to use it was to swipe on the key in the direction of the letter/symbol you wanted.

It was really quite good, and a shame it never caught on.

Just installed it now. I think it's missing the '2 spaces for period-and-space' feature but it seems pretty nice other than that! (I guess that makes sense for a programming keyboard though.)

> '2 spaces for period-and-space'

I hate to be the one to break it to you but ... I think we're not supposed to do this any more? It's a change I still struggle with.

Apologies to any I've offended with this. Style guides were updated in the last 4-5 years to say that one single space after a period is correct. I think Word even changed how it handles it as well.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/punctuatio...

what's wrong with this?

I believe the GP meant that some keyboards will produce '. ' when the spacebar is tapped twice.

Yeah on Apple devices two spaces gets converted to a period and one space. It’s just a shortcut, it doesn’t leave the 2 spaces in.

Yeah, I was talking about the shortcut. Although, since a period is just a swipe away, it's not so bad.

I'm desperate for an Android keyboard! I need to type English, Czech, and Polish. We live in the age of LLMs, they not only know the words, they know how to use them together! Shocking!

I'd like to use glide typing (slide finger to type). Yet all the Android keyboards I've tried (GBoard and Microsoft SwifKey) can't hint basic forms of words an elementary school child would know.

Wrt Unexpected Keyboard, I find it tedious to type all letters separately on a touchscreen. Don't you?

Help me!

Someone downthread proposed FUTO keyboard, I'm trying it right now and it's fantastic. Give it a shot !

I used to use slide typing, but I've mostly reverted to tapping, at least the first 3 or 4 letters, until autocomplete can figure out what I want. I'm not really sure why, it just feels more natural.

Did you try AnySoft Keyboard?

Multiling O Keyboard

Thanks this seems very good. Being able to flick #! off the 'e' is nice. The position of . and , is a bit weird on the left of the keybord. But i do like the curser control and brackets usage. There is some buggy activity with capitals appearing eg ttt55555%%%%%TTT% randomly. And it misses autocomplete and auto capitalisation for general usec

I literally downloaded last week this keyboard to do the Advent of Code on the go

This is similar to how Japanese use a 3x4 flick but the difference is that 1 word is typically 3-6 syllables where Latin is double the amount, also triple the amount of words per sentence.

This is very similar to Japanese "flick" input:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhD6r8NKlmY

Japanese flick input is closer to thumb-key ( https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key I just discovered in another comment), and even that's a bit different as you get to input a consonant+vowel pair at a time (e.g. ka-ki-ku-ke-ko on a key)

I switch between Japanese input and hacker keyboard all the time for termux and it's much faster to type Japanese; this thread made me want to try both thumb-key and unexpected keyboard but I think I'll try thumb-key first.

It's great, just NEEDS one thing:

Configuration export/import.

I just installed it. And thus far: it makes sense. I need to get used to this one. Weird thing is: I don't mis the autocorrect other keyboards usually have.

Nothing beats the privacy-oriented FUTO keyboard for me.

I just installed it...mind blown. Thank you for posting this.

Super easy to use... usual spelling errors are gone... would need a multilingual/serbian keyboard :) as well

It has both latin and cyrillic! Go to settings and tap Add an alternate layout.

Awesome stuff! I used to use Hackers Keyboard (up until … now!) but it’s not OSS, hasnt been updated, and i use the swipe even there.

Thanks for sharing!

[edit]

Even more for making!

Thank you for posting, this is game changer, I have quite an old phone and this keyboard help me use it less unbearable

Very innovative but it seems to require a level of precision that I don't think I've achieved on a phone keyboard.

Very nice keyboard. It would be so awesome if auto-complete and auto-correct would be added as optional features.

iOS app Textastic features a similar swipe-to-key-corner feature.

https://www.textasticapp.com/

It's wonderful. There's also a macOS version.

I've been unsatisfied with Heliboard, so I might give this a try

ThumbKey inspired Querty, that's cool I guess.

Any keyboard with an undo button?

Any ideas how to make it privacy-respecting? It should remember everything to do that.

it doesn't need to have infinite undo, just if I inadvertently do a "select all" and touch a letter, it would give my text back.

now I can use this and try to be like this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42374823

I love the small keyboard

Using it since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32658104

What doesn't work:

1. Ctrl/Alt isn't passed to RDP session in the official MS app.

1. Sometimes number input moves the decimal to a swipe and this is kinda... dumb.

It's not as fast as Hacker's Keyboard but overall it works good and I even did wrote some small things on it.

I replaced all HK with UK on all my phones and one tablet.

Can recommend.

Sad that a keyboard even needs to say that it's "privacy-conscious." What a world we've built, where one might reasonably worry that their keyboard _isn't_ private.

I never developed much trust in current smartphones where in some countries the SIM can be a backdoor.

And the baseband everywhere?

The standalone microcontroller in your physical keyboard can run arbitrary code, and it's been able to since we've invented keyboards attached to the computer via a port. What's there to stop the manufacturer (or a sophisticated attacker) from:

- recording your keystrokes in non-volatile memory, to be extracted later?

- exfiltrating them in real-time via Bluetooth (yay for wireless peripherals), WiFi, LoRa?

- asking the OS to install a driver, which (even if approved/signed) could have exploitable security holes?

The main hurdles are scale and sophistication, which, with an all-software "keyboard", were no longer an issue.

You can flash your own firmware which you can inspect. QMK and ZMK are two very popular options.

By "very popular", you mean "as many as 0.0001% of people worldwide use it", though.

That's a gross underestimation. At current world population levels that comes out to be 8000 people. The QMK github repo alone has over 18k stars and almost 40k forks. So yeah very popular!

Ok, so let's be very generous and say 0.002% :) Very popular!

now exclude world population who is not using computers with separate keyboards in the first place. and maybe everyone who would not bother with firmware. in that context it's sorta popular. maybe even very.

The same problem exists for the main processor as well. The issue persists.

Weren't (true) PS/2 keyboards exempt from all of that? Of course someone could always achieve the first one with enough effort, but it would be adding in lots of things from scratch rather than repurposing the existing hardware that many keyboards have now.

And PS/2 had a maximum draw of 100mA so even piggybacking on that would be challenging I'd assume(?) - not an expert. A Teensy which was benchmark for lots of custom keyboards can pull most of that [1].

[1] https://forum.pjrc.com/index.php?threads/teensy-3-6-vs-4-0-m...

See eg https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-h...

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