I practice on monkeytype.com . Usually takes about 2 days to get comfortable, and a month to get up to full speed. You can easily get 40wpm with this tho in a short time.
So, last week I bought Thumb-Key on Google Play (without much research … my fault). I saw some pictures and took for granted some features that are essential for me (a MessagEase user for almost 10 years). I actually enjoyed the feeling of Thumb-Key even more than MessagEase, but …
I want to know if there is a way to have my specific keyboard (Portuguese), which is a variation of a Spanish keyboard with some accented letters and punctuations marks in different places (and floating diacritics, which is not a feature yet, right. I miss that, but it’s not essential). I’d say that if I can get my letters in their correct places, it would already be usable, while I wait for the app to be more mature.
I read about the pull request procedure, but this makes an “official” language keyboard, doesn’t it? As I understood it’s not something that anyone can make, change a little something and have their keyboard there, or is it? Is there some procedure that I can make without being a seasoned programmer or customization is totally out of question? Is it fine if I make my idiosyncratic changes to ESMessagEase.kt, make it a custom PTMessagEase.kt and find my way in Github?
If you enable spacebar slide gestures, it won’t do that. But yes I agree, this should probably be removed. Open up an issue on the github if you would.
No. But you can add a new keyboard layout with the change and submit a PR.
See tickets
604, very similar to your request; and 586, a more general and better solution. Both have been rejected by @dessalines, and the ticket comments contain his thoughts on why not.
whoopee!!! Another layout with the great difference of one key. When It gets 1 million of layouts, thumb key will get a podium in ginness world record.😆
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.
There’s a ticket for this, which has been rejected. The author believes a better approach is to keep adding variants for every minor change. I did make a comment essentially arguing your point, but @dessalines disagrees.
A good action would be to go to github and upvote the closed feature request, but I’m beginnig to believe the only option is to hard-fork the project so we can add this feature. I really hate hard forks, but sometimes it’s the only option when there’s such a fundamental disagreement.
Maybe if enough folks went and advocated for #586, @dessalines might be pursuaded.
I really hate forks in most of cases, because In most of cases it has the same effect as adding variants and more variants of the same keyboard without any further control that the Kotlin format is correct, because perhaps the arrangement of the letters is not correct, and of course a keyboard is not a mp3 player that you can try for a while and if you see that it is not the right one you change, changing keyboards requires a huge effort and affects muscle memory and is not a game. I used messagease for more than a decade and I didn’t change it for anything. When I discovered thumb-key, what attracted me the most, besides of course being opensource, was that the developer commented that his new distribution was better than Messagease’s, but from what I’ve seen, the only keyboard he maintains is the English version of Thumb-Key. key all the other versions are custom versions from someone who thought that this was the correct distribution for that other language without having provided any argument. Nor has that distribution been approved by the developer beyond that person having uploaded the kotlin file In correct format, there may already be a carrot in the letter “a” that the keyboard will be published as x language keyboard. And when someone else arrives and wants to put a tomato on the “i”, there will be a keyboard that draws tomato emojis on the letter “i”. Of course I understand the position of the developer who considers that in-app modification is not feasible for him, he is the owner of his time and he did a lot by contributing a keyboard like this to the community. But I also think that allowing every person who wants to make a new keyboard to change a key to do so is not the solution at all. and maybe control at least the variants of his own layout because when you open the keyboard you think or I at least thought that the layouts of his keyboard were his, not someone who decided to make the language variant on his own with or without any criteria. For example, I have seen that in French there are two thumb keys, which one starts with the keyboard? which is better? Are any of them supported by the developer or were they created by someone who put the letters by eye without really knowing what they were doing? I believe that this system only creates confusion and fills the list with often absurd layouts. But of course this is just my opinion.
Thumb key started with a pretty small amount of layouts. While creating a variant and PRing it might not be the cleanest solution, it definitely works. There have even been rejected open PRs adding in-app layout customizaiton (to some degree), and they were rejected mainly due to unnecessary complexity.
Here are my few main reasons I think the current system is fine:
One of the only major downsides is that a new user might have a harder time finding the appropriate keyboard layout. However, if somebody is installing thumb-key, there’s a 99% chance they’re either a former MessagEase user (in which case they just select the MessagEase layout and continue with their life) or a curious person who is willing to experiment with a weird keyboard like this and try out 4 or 5 different layouts they find interesting. There are some ongoing discussions in the issues about a better naming scheme for the layouts, so new users can distinguish them better.
Implementing a in-app layout modification system with good UX would be very time consuming, and the developer’s main project is working on lemmy and the Jerboa app - I imagine there isn’t really that much time left to sink in hours for such a big feature. Most, if not all “bigger” features like slide gestures were several PRs from several differennt people, sometimes over the span of months.
Creating and maintaining your layout isn’t that hard - it can even be done without android studio, and in 1-3-ish iterations over the course of a week or two you get a layout that you are likely to use for a long time (at least, that’s how it was for me). Dessalines is, in my opinion, exceptionally quick in merging PRs and making new releases, so it’s really not that bad.
It’s just to fetch the Changelog. There’s probably a way to generate one tho and bundle it in, so remove the need for that perm. Open up an issue on the github and I can work on it.
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