Thumb-Key

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About

Thumb-Key is a privacy-conscious smart keyboard, made specifically for your thumbs.

It features a 3x3 grid layout, as many older phones had, and uses swipes for the less common letters. Initial testing shows that you can reach ~25 words per minute after a day of use.

Instead of relying on profit-driven, privacy-offending word and sentence prediction for accuracy, as do most popular phone keyboards like Gboard and Swiftkey, Thumb-Key uses large keys with predictable positions, to prevent your eyes from hunting and pecking for letters.

As the key positions get ingrained into your muscle memory, eventually you'll be able to appromixate the fast speeds of touch-typing, your eyes never having to leave the text edit area.

This project is a follow-up to the now unmaintained (and closed-source) MessageEase Keyboard, which is its main inspiration.

founded 2 years ago
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I know this probably isn't the place to report this, but the Swedish layout for thumb-key has a bug where the q, x, and w-keys don't work with an upwards swipe (or not at all, really). Sorry if it's inappropriate posting this here, didn't really know where else 😃 (couldn't submit as an issue on GitHub)

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I want to work on implementing a feature that's marked as "good first issue". I have a lot of experience with other stacks, but have never done Android app dev.

Can someone write a quick 2-minute guide on what software is required and how to build/test the application? Is "Android Studio" latest the right build tool? Thanks!

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I am a longtime MessagEase user and I am really happy to know that someone is trying to recreate it, as the original project was discontinued. Even though I am very excited with thumb key, for now it is not as usable and feature-rich as it could be, at least for my needs. I am aware that the app is very young and that some of these features might be just around the corner, but I think it might be useful to post them anyway.

  1. Floating accents

This is the most urgent one. I am a Portuguese speaker and I need to use a lot of diacritics (ã, à, á, â, é, ê, í, õ, ó, ô, ú, ç), so it's not viable having a key for each of these "special characters" because it would clutter the keyboard like crazy, and take space from other useful symbols.

In MessagEase I could type, for example, "~" and then "a" and I'd get "ã" instead of "~a". To get "~" I would type "~" and then "space".

  1. Drag-and-return and circle-drag

This is a great thing to save space in the keyboard and time while typing, as many symbols can be accessed this way. All caps could be achieved with a drag-and-return on shift, all capitalized letters could be reached with a circle-drag on the letter... As well as many useful special symbols.

  1. Combine key

On the upper-left corner of the A key MessagEase had a combine key, that was really useful to get even more symbols. The combinations can be easily customizable, too.

Thank you very much for this project. And if you need someone to test experimental features, you can count on me.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/thumbkey@lemmy.ml
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/thumbkey@lemmy.ml
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