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Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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'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

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.

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