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Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the argument here. I use Android, and assuming the experience is no different, I only have to put the word in once and tap to accept as a new word in my dictionary.

There's a vast swath of people who don't want to use curse words for various reasons, and how terrible it would be to accidentally insert "fuck" in your work-only phone!

Besides, we aren't all super coordinated with phones. I've been typing on these keyboards for two years now, and I wouldn't be able to live without auto-correct. I'm guessing that, since you are such an expert of using the keyboard that you apparently never misfire, perhaps you ought to roll without auto-correct? I know a few people that do...

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I find autocorrect so annoying it's always the first thing I disable when getting a phone. Sure I make more typos, but at least the phone doesn't keep trying to think instead of me.

Actually, the most mistakes I've ever made when sending blurbs of texts was the several months before I figured out how to disable autocorrect on Tweetbot on my Mac. Man that was terrible. Kept having to delete tweets because I hit "Send" before fixing the autocorrected text.

Alas, if you frequently use two different languages and often mix them both in the same sentence (common among bilinguals) autocorrect is your absolute bane because it will always do the wrong thing.

Yeah, I've been contemplating disabling autocorrect system-wide on my Mac because of how infuriating it is. It's not as useful because I'm much more accurate with a physical keyboard, it's more difficult to cancel a correction because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to my mouse or trackpad then click a tiny "x", and frankly it's often just an absurd correction.

To cancel it, you can just hit escape when the correction is displayed.

I have found that SwiftKey basically lets me blindly mash the keyboard in the direction of the keys I want to press and it will insert the correct words, and I use three languages (English/Spanish/Greek).

I'll have to try if that exists for iOS then ...

The sticking point for me, so far, has been when I use an English word but declense it like it was a Slovenian word. Every time I do that, autocorrect thinks I can't type even though I typed exactly what I wanted to.

And with 18 different declension suffixes for nouns and ~15 for verbs and proverbs, it would take autocorrect ages to learn how to spell. Especially since the correct spelling is context dependant and usually only a letter different than the wrong spellings.

As far as I know, SwiftKey uses a Markov chain with length 2 or 3, so it can usually decline the words correctly and give you the right one. Greek is similar, and I have no problems there (it does sometimes screw up two-word letters that only differ by one letter, though).

Android's default keyboard (at least on KitKat; not sure how far back this goes) has a setting to turn off the profanity filter.

From the keyboard, hold comma to get to the settings menu, pick Google Keyboard Settings, scroll down under "Text Correction", and uncheck "Block offensive words".

It's a setting in the "Google Keyboard" you can get from the Play Store for Ice Cream Sandwich/Jelly Bean/KitKat (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...).

It still stays shy about suggesting naughty words when you swipe ("gesture type"), though. I got curious, and it looks like manually adding the ones you care about in Settings > Personal Dictionary gets around that. Just for completeness, voice recognition has its own "block offensive words" option in its settings (phone settings -> language and input -> settings icon next to "Google voice typing").

I don't see a way around it in SwiftKey. I wouldn't mind a similar checkbox (hey, always good to match Google Keyboard's features, right?) but it hasn't been a huge deal--it's like typing names or other things not in the dictionary (tap the left completion when you're done), which works for me.

I had to go a half step farther... In order for the swipe input to get the curse words first, I had to add them to my personal dictionary, including derivatives...

Fucking annoying, but relatively easy to get the little fucker to output the shit I want.

Call me a snob, but I couldn't bear to let a computer correct my spelling for me. I love the squiggly underline of the spellcheck (irony note: spellcheck is not in my dictionary) but I want that as a passive feature, not an active one. What ship-brained ducking count ever thought that was a good idea?

Me: activates phone, types "fuck", verifies that phone suggests "fuck", sleeps phone

Me: activates tablet, types 'fuck', verifies that phone suggests music, get suckered into listening to that song again…

http://i.imgur.com/lAimHhn.png

You would be fine without autocorrect if you hadn't been using autocorrect so long, probably. I've found a great keyboard for Andorid called Hacker's Keyboard. It's fully like a QWERTY when sideways.

You couldn't live without a draggable gesture word style keyboard if you tried one for a while probably. I've found them to greatly improve my speed and accuracy for english text.

I've tried it and it was wrtong too often.

I rest my case.

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