• cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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    1 year ago

    Yesterday discussed on HN

    I’ll quote myself:

    One thing this article does not mention and what makes mobile text editing slightly more bearable: Using the volume buttons to control the text cursor.

    It doesn’t support desktop modifiers like Ctrl or Shift, but at least you can properly place the cursor where you want without going mad. For some reason, only LineageOS has that feature, and not even every other custom ROM. I once tried a different ROM and switched back because the feature was missing, horrible.

    • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      OpenBoard does allow to use the spacebar to position the cursor. Holding it down and den swipe left or right to move the cursor.

        • SatyrSack@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          One thing I really like about the iOS keyboard is that doing that can move the cursor in all directions. On Android keyboards, dragging the spacebar can only move it left/right.

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Agreed, there’s enough room to go two lines down and many up. Android can already go up/down without issues if you have a keyboard with arrow keys, so keyboards would just need to implement the gesture.

            IOS also has contextual tab buttons that are very nice. I wish other companies would copy the things apple does well instead of the bullshit they actually copy.

          • WestwardWind@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            IIRC only iOS has that because apple holds a patent on that specific implementation. Which sucks because on Gboard the space bar can be quite small and the timing between activating the cursor scroll and opening the language menu seems like 0.15 seconds

          • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
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            1 year ago

            @WestwardWind@lemm.ee SwiftKey on Android also supports moving the cursor in all directions.

        • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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          1 year ago

          But GBoard has change language as spacebar hold action by default? That said, swiping lacks a lot of control compared to buttons. While I can’t test this specifically, I know that from highlighting text.

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            It has both by default. If you hold, you get the language selector but if you swipe, it moves the cursor. Gboard also has some acceleration on the swipes which makes them wildly imprecise, now I use florisboard which doesn’t do that.

          • Fondots@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’m not sure what the defaults are on Gboard because I’ve tinkered with the settings a lot by now, but you can have both long press to change language and swipe to move cursor at the same time, they don’t really interfere with each other, I just did both while writing this comment.

            Also I’m not sure how many people have more than one language enabled on their keyboard, I’m admittedly not in a great position to judge that as an American since not too many of us speak more than one language with any regularity or fluency. A lot of people don’t tinker with the settings too much and for a lot of languages that use some variant of the Latin alphabet using the keyboard of your main language is probably sufficient for most other Latin alphabet languages in like 99% of cases. I suspect a lot of people don’t bother (though I’m happy to be proven wrong)

            • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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              1 year ago

              The alphabet in my case is the same, but swiping needs to know what language I’m using, or it will get the prediction wrong.

              That said, I simply did not understand how it works and the longpress does not interfere.

      • Deebster@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I use Gboard which does the same, but I also have multiple languages enabled which you switch by long-pressing the spacebar and I regularly trigger the wrong one - very annoying.

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Hacker’s Keyboard has arrow keys, shift, ctrl, alt, and escape. This isn’t a limitation of phone keyboards in general, just the poor design choices of most stock keyboards.

        • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Man now I want those too. Can you call up the keyboard manually to use them outside of text entry?

          • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Hacker’s Keyboard has an option for a persistent notification that can be used to bring up the keyboard whenever you want. On mobile Linux, at least on Phosh (which is the environment that squeekboard is a part of) there is a button on the bottom bar that pulls up the keyboard whenever you want it.

          • cwagner@lemmy.cwagner.me
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            1 year ago

            IIRC it does not support swiping, which, for me and plain text, is by far the most efficient input method on tiny devices.

        • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          For everyday writing I like to use MessagEase. It’s highly ergonomic thanks to the 3x3 grid and deeply customizable. I’ve been happily using it for over a decade now (it continues to receive updates) and for the past 8 years I’ve been able to touch-type on it without looking at my fingers

          The documentation is all in-app, so I’ve taken the liberty of screenshotting the relevant pages for illustrative purposes:

      • AgnosticMammal@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        Oh hey, I actually looked into alternative keyboards on Android the other day. Stumbled on Unexpected Keyboard, where the “press and hold” alternative symbols are accessible by swiping in the direction of it from its key instead. I think because it’s FOSS, they’ve also added a whole bunch of other keyboard support such as ctrl and some unicode keys.

        I’ve found that I prefer to tap and hold to get the alternative keys, but I loved the additional keys it had that were within easy visibility. Though it did look quite clustered that the default Samsung keyboard that I’m used to.

        • krey@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Thank you. I’m trying it right now. So far it crashed just once (after adding a second layout). I actually love the swiping. It feels like it will save so much time.