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.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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.