Unexpected Keyboard – customiseable Android Keyboard with all keys available

15 pointsposted 2 days ago
by speerer

7 Comments

atoav

a day ago

Using it right now, it is good in many ways, but could improve in terms of hit and miss. I often hit n or c where I meant to hit the space bar, so the real collision checks should probably not be based on the contour lines but on the centroids of each keys heatmap or something.

The ability to use actual shortcuts like Ctrl+C and CTRL+V is really nice, shift selection and swipes to move the cursor by one character are truly amazing.

I don't really care for autocorrect, but sometimes it would have been nice to make the typing more reliable. What I wish for would be more customizing options, e.g. moving the cursor by horizontally wiping is amazing, but way too fast/inaccurate on my device.

mdaniel

2 days ago

I just wanted to offer that I love this keyboard, it's one of the first things I reinstall on a new phone. I regret there isn't any sane system of knowing which swipe corner contains which character but for the "trust me, I'm a professional" use cases - when I need it then it's there for me

As a side advantage: I trust it to not log keys more than Gboard in incognito mode

usr1106

2 days ago

I don't use Android a lot, but finding a keyboard puts me off the most every time. Obviously I don't want Google to earn more money by me typing.

Unexpected keyboard is one of my favorites. But suggesting word completions would be nice. I see no reason why this could not be done with free software and locally.

mdaniel

a day ago

For sure it can[1] but Julow's perspective is that it's a lot of work so if it's important to someone the contribution would need to come from the community: https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/issues/343

Interestingly while searching for that issue I learned that FUTO claims to have both a machine learning based autocomplete[2] and a swipe input so I'll definitely have to try that out. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to teach FUTO about the corner keys than to try and integrate predictions and swiping into Unexpected

1: https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.menny.android.anysof...

2: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/keyboard-wiki/-/wikis/FUTO-...

3: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/keyboard-wiki/-/wikis/FUTO-...

Llamamoe

2 days ago

My problem is that inevitably, precision while typing on a mobile keyboard is low, and you NEED autocorrect, in most cases autocorrect supporting 2 languages simultaneously.

One feature I miss from Swift Key for android 2 is that it'd record and calculate heatmaps of where you hit keys, and use them instead of the visible boxes(or maybe just to tweak probabilities of autocorrect?), which worked invisibly to massively reduce mistakes.

usr1106

2 days ago

What do you mean by support languages simultaneously?

I need 5 languages, 3 daily and 2 more weekly or less. Switching between them should be easy.

leephillips

2 days ago

This is what I use for Termux. I found that I learned the symbol positions after a short amount of use, and it’s quite efficient and configurable (preferences for key size and spacing, etc.).