• @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      171 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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        171 year ago

        That was originally a Gboard feature but it’s great, so every decent keyboard supports it now.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            51 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
            link
            41 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)

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        21 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
          link
          English
          2
          edit-2
          1 year ago

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

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            21 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.

      • Deebster
        link
        fedilink
        2
        edit-2
        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          2
          edit-2
          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:

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        41 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.