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Comment by sholladay | Hacker News Reader

> it doesn't deal well with doubled vs single letters, etc.

You mean like the two E’s in “feel” or the two L’s in “fell”? I just tried and it handles them well. Are you aware of the circling technique? When you want to double up on a letter, you briefly circle it slightly. I believe some keyboards let you hover momentarily without circling.

Try it, swipe F-E-L, it should complete to “fell”, then do the same thing again but form a small, tight circle over the E, it should then complete to “feel”. Works for me every time.

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It does, actually. Do a loop around the doubled letter. It's a common swipe gesture on most keyboards, IIRC, for at least a decade. Not sure why it's hardly ever mentioned. iphones only got it a few years ago.

So for feel, you start at F, go to E, loop once, then L. For fell, start at F, go to E, then loop on L. Very easy to pick up as a physical habit.

I just tested those two on futo, and it easily picked them both out.

I just horizontally backtrack my finger over the double letter. Easier to do and produces the same result.

FWIW, I just switched to FUTO yesterday and (out of the box at least) it doesn't support this. With gboard, that works great, but with FUTO it does not.

I looked in the "Swipe Typing" options and there doesn't seem to be a config for it.

On the iPhone at least, following your instructions, I got anything from ‘feel’ to ‘fell’ to ‘grok’ to ‘felt’.

Is it possible that your keyboard’s particular dictionary knows the words you’re more likely to use and adjusts for it?

Edit - Also got ‘grill’. Notice how the -t in felt and -I- in grill are not near path to L.

My guess is you are deleting the word each time. Unlike the FUTO keyboard, the iPhone keyboard will give you different results each time after you delete because it assumes that if you delete a word, it’s probably because the autocomplete got it wrong, so it gives you a different result on the next try.

A workaround is to use the Notes app and use the return key to make a new line after each try, rather than deleting. That should give you more consistent results.

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