A few days ago I started the search for an alternative keyboard to the common gboard. One keyboard that came up was Thumb-key. I find the concept of typing everything with one thumb really interesting. So I gave it a try and am using it from time to time (like right now). But the learning curve feels steep and I start to wonder, if this way of typing will ever come close to typing on a regular keyboard.
Is anybody using Thumb-key on a daily basis, and how fast can you type?
I tried it for a while but gave up. It may be possible to get up to the typing speed of a regular keyboard, but it’s main purpose is to be less error prone than a more traditional touchscreen keyboard. Gboard and others use autocorrect to make up for how easy it is to misclick, but that requires large libraries and (in Gboard’s case) telemetry/data collection. Thumb-key’s advantage is it’s simplicity. It doesnt need autocorrect or predictive typing, because the buttons are large and the gestures are well defined and distinct. You should very rarely accidentally type the wrong character once you’re used to it. I never got over that hump, but I’m sure some others have and enjoy typing without looking like we used to be able to do on physical keypads.
Yes I’ve been using it in some form for about 15 years - FYI it originally started as the MessagEase keyboard; Thumb-Key is an open source replacement (maintained by none-other than Dessalines of Lemmy), so I was using MessagEase for most of that time but Thumb-Key can replicate its layout.
The reason I chose it is because I use Dvorak on desktop, but Dvorak is notoriously bad for one thumb typing so I thought if I was going to learn a new layout I may as well learn something that’s optimised for one thumb. As for whether it’s faster, I have nothing to really compare it to, I’m not anywhere near as fast as on my physical Dvorak keyboard (which I use significantly more) but I’ve never used anything else on touch screen.
I’m using it! But only for a week or so. Definitely a skill and not something you can be fast on right away. I’m just getting to the point where I can type some things without looking at the keyboard. Was pretty slow at first, still a little slower than the normal keyboard. I seem to be still in the ‘rapid improvement’ phase so hopefully will get ahead of the normal keyboard soon.
I tried the layouts of thumbkey, it didn’t click, so I made a private fork that gives you roughly the same positions as on a qwerty (in my case localised german qwerty with umlauts). I’m slower than on normal keyboards, but that doesn’t matter, as the display of my phone is absurdly small (3 inch unihertz jelly star).
my “mod” was built years ago, and since then lots of things have changed in the thumb key codebase. I should really update and redo my keyboard layout
Yeah I also struggle with the layouts. I feel like they are not optimal for German, even the German layout. Most of the letters that often come in pairs like mm or ll are locked behind swipe gestures, which makes it really hard to type them fast. I get, why the most common letters are in the top layer, but I think swiping twice the same letter takes so much more time than swiping a common letter once… Maybe I have to adjust it a little. As far as I understand it is possible to edit the layouts in the app.
In that case, I attached you a screenshot of my personal layout. I tried optimizing for
- roughly qwertz positions to easen learning curve
- most common german monograms, bigrams and some trigrams (confer how you’d input “sch” with a very quick diagonal tap tap swipe gesture with only one change in one dimension, staying on one axis)
- keeping ergonomics in mind, optimized for right hand use and positioning more common letters with more easy to execute gestures, and having as few out of bounds gestures as possible
- not ignoring english completely
I really should update my thumb key