this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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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.

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Thumbkey is a great project for me. But I think that the issue of creating keyboards and variants should be more controlled perhaps by the creator. There are so many variants that it can be confusing at times. Who tells me that the Spanish version of Thumbkey that has moved keys over the original version is the correct one or even the original would not be better just adding the necessary diacritics and the ñ. Many may tell me: "Well, you create your variant and that's it," but with that there would only be another variant to confuse a new person who arrives. Perhaps over time a way to modify your keyboards locally could be added and perhaps share them if someone likes it similar to how 8vim does. But perhaps having every opinion on how the key layout should be in the official version as part of the official application is not the best idea.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think having so many options is great, probably just need more documentation

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

well, it depends. I prefer have 20 good films that 1000 films that are really hard to see. I'm no saying that have many options is bad, I say that is not good have weird options. Like I said a keyboard is class of app very sensible and training the muscular memory is hard and long, and have keyboards with the same name of the official layout supported by the developer is not good because people can think that that's the variant that the developer gives for that language and is not. I think a quality filter is necesary to add a new keyboard not only a kotlin format filter. If not it will be 1000 layouts and no one can know have to choose.