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Thumb-Key Speed (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago by HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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A few days ago I started the search for an alternative keyboard to the common gboard. One keyboard that came up was Thumb-key. I find the concept of typing everything with one thumb really interesting. So I gave it a try and am using it from time to time (like right now). But the learning curve feels steep and I start to wonder, if this way of typing will ever come close to typing on a regular keyboard.

Is anybody using Thumb-key on a daily basis, and how fast can you type?

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[–] haerrii@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I tried the layouts of thumbkey, it didn't click, so I made a private fork that gives you roughly the same positions as on a qwerty (in my case localised german qwerty with umlauts). I'm slower than on normal keyboards, but that doesn't matter, as the display of my phone is absurdly small (3 inch unihertz jelly star).

my "mod" was built years ago, and since then lots of things have changed in the thumb key codebase. I should really update and redo my keyboard layout

[–] HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah I also struggle with the layouts. I feel like they are not optimal for German, even the German layout. Most of the letters that often come in pairs like mm or ll are locked behind swipe gestures, which makes it really hard to type them fast. I get, why the most common letters are in the top layer, but I think swiping twice the same letter takes so much more time than swiping a common letter once... Maybe I have to adjust it a little. As far as I understand it is possible to edit the layouts in the app.

[–] haerrii@feddit.org 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

In that case, I attached you a screenshot of my personal layout. I tried optimizing for

roughly qwertz positions to easen learning curve
most common german monograms, bigrams and some trigrams (confer how you'd input "sch" with a very quick diagonal tap tap swipe gesture with only one change in one dimension, staying on one axis)
keeping ergonomics in mind, optimized for right hand use and positioning more common letters with more easy to execute gestures, and having as few out of bounds gestures as possible
not ignoring english completely

I really should update my thumb key

[–] HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org 2 points 7 hours ago

Thank you for sharing your layout. It was a good starting point. I changed some things arond a bit and arrived at the following layout. I find it good for writing in german, but in english there are still some challenges like ou or oo that are kind of slow...

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