I can touch type with a physical keyboard, which helps somewhat with trying to type on smartphone virtual keyboards, but I still find myself way clumsier and error-prone on them when I try to touch tap-type on them.
For the most part I’ve worked around this via swipe/gesture-typing on virtual keyboards, but even that method is error-prone. So, I’d like to try to learn to tap-type similar to how I know how to touch type, but many resources I find are for physical keyboards instead, so…Any help here?
Can you even touch type on a screen without the feedback of physical keyboards?
Not as well as on a physical keyboard, but I can. I know how wide my phone is and I hold it in the same grip every time, so I can get it roughly correct and most mistakes are fixed by autocorrect anyway.
Nope. Not reliably any how. Touch typing relies on locating the F and J keys; which is why they have those raised bumps.
Now what you can do, is practice a similar tactic; except you’ll have to look at the screen to localize,
From what I’ve seen of some folks, it at least seems like it, but maybe I’m mistaken and it’s more experience with tap-typing.
Learn swype type… much faster, imo. I’m shocked how few people i see use it.
Fwiw that’s what I primarily do, but it’s felt a little slower and still error-prone, whereas I’d think/hope direct tap-typing might mitigate both.
Well, it’s definitely an individual timing skill. Only you’ll know which is better. I personally fly via swipe.
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I tried that out like years ago for the first time and didn’t really get the hang of it. But i just activated it again and wow, i didn’t expect it to be that fast and intuitive for me.
The swype predictions have gotten worse and worse over the years
I think it’s more a matter of knowing the qwerty layout and trusting that the autocorrect will help you if you mess up.
Tbh that’s probably correct, and the differences may be from me avoiding autocorrect as much as possible because of obnoxious stuff like it persistently trying to correct fav words like fuck
Over time it figures out which words you use and doesn’t clobber your vernacular as much. You also can get good at watching the suggestions and picking the right one rather than finishing typing the word
Except it has learned my most common misspellings now
https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key this can be pretty quick once you get used to it
I’ve been trying it out and I like it a lot! Haven’t switched yet though.
OK, what if I just care for privacy and I’m happy with the QWERTY layout?
I’d love to ditch Gboard, but it has my native language in it, plus word underline when misspelling words. I don’t use predictive text or anything like that, just underline (I hate predictive text, it messes up my train of thought).
Alternatives?
Florisboard, openboard, anysoftkeyboard
Which of them offer spelling check underline?
I’ve not tried Florisboard yet, but OpenBoard doesn’t have it (neither in the main build nor forks from what I can tell) and nor is it available in AnySoftKeyboard’s default install, but it’s highly customizable so it may be an option there.
That said, isn’t spellcheck underlining more frequently in the apps you’re typing into rather than the virtual keyboard? Tbh I hadn’t ever noticed it in Gboard before, but I haven’t used it in a little while (though in looking into its settings I see it now, I guess I thought it’d been the other apps instead the whole time).
Idk if that’s a feature keyboards have or if it’s more on the os side
Looks nice. Anyone good advice which layout to choose to type 60% German and 40% english? There are several german ones available.
No clue, sorry. Looking at the list, I’d go with “multilingual thumb-key” or just thumb-key. Messageease is the proprietary keyboard thumb key is based on, and I think more thought has been put into making even more optimized layouts for thumbkey, so I’d guess the messageease one is a bit outdated, and I think there might be a two hand mode that “type-split” is for but idk
thx for the background info. I’ll try them.
If you must type go to a real computer. A bluetooth keyboard might work too.
monkeytype.com! Offers typing challenges and tracks your progress.
