I agree!
On that note, Hacker’s Keyboard is by far my favourite on-screen keyboard. After years of using that, I’m really struggling to get used to Squeekboard. The lack of alternate character popover makes the switch especially brutal for me.
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A compromise approach could be that the keyboard offers only a single auto-completion, and it does so within the text being typed rather than as an extra line on the keyboard.
Sailfish OS has a similar keyboard with suggestions at the top. However the Sailfish keyboard feels squeezed up, I’m forever hitting the full stop instead of the space bar. Squeekboard on the other hand has a better layout.
This is how my first prototype is intended to work.
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My vote (if that’s what we’re doing here):
- Definitely “alternate character popover” at some point down the road, that is really useful. What would be a great way to implement would be to give users the ability to select which alternate characters they want popping over which primary characters.
- For autocorrect/complete, I much prefer three options on a bar (with a smaller typing space) than a single option popping up in the text. I find that things being inserted in my text is very disruptive to my thought process, though evidently others don’t have that problem.
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Can the computer/phone guess from the currently chosen keyboard?
Maybe sometimes, but in my case using Swedish and English the thing is that a Swedish keyboard basically just adds three extra characters (å ä ö) in addition to what the English keyboard has, so I would prefer to always have a Swedish keyboard layout, there is not much point in selecting the English one. Especially since even when I write in English I might want/need to throw in a Swedish word (or a name of a Swedish person having å ä ö in the name) as part of the text I am writing in English. So I would prefer having the Swedish keyboard always. I think it might be like that for many other languages as well, that the keyboard mostly adds a few extra things in addition to what the English keyboard has.
Also, even if the computer/phone could somehow know which language I am currently typing in, there are always cases where languages mix, I use some words from the other language in the middle of the text, I want to be able to do that without switching keyboard layouts if all characters I need are anyway available in the Swedish layout, then I want to be able to write something in English while having the Swedish keyboard selected so that I can use å ä ö in the middle of my English text, it could be just for persons’ names that use those characters.
Just like the laptop I’m using to type this right now, it has the å ä ö keys on its keyboard which is good for me, and that does not stop me from writing in English, I don’t need a special English keyboard for that.
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I think it is abundantly clear that no one solution will satisfy everyone, let alone be ideal for everyone. Hence: lots of configurability!
I can understand that. I’m a bit used to it because that’s what LibreOffice does (auto-completion inline). Probably for a keyboard, I would prefer no auto-completion inline and “three options on a bar”, as you say, because, in my case, that’s what I am used to from the iPhone.
However we are muddying the waters and talking about a bunch of different functionality:
- auto-correct
- auto-completion inline
- suggested completions out of line
- auto-spellcheck
plus, unrelated, alternative character popover
plus questions about what dictionary or dictionaries get used for the first set of functionality.
Auto-spellcheck is useful because that is an easy way of adding “new” words to a local dictionary, which then feeds back into the other functionality in the first set of functionality.
I’m going to agree with GNOME folks there and say that configurability is a burden. On the other hand, I know that clever design can make this someone else’s burden. So while we don’t have a layout for a single French+Swedish keyboard, and we don’t have the UI for it, it’s simple to create one using other tools.
I intend to keep the same principle for configuring suggestions/corrections: advanced config possible but no GUI.
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yerk, that’s why I can’t use GNOME on desktop, the one-fit-for-all thinking because configurability is a burden for the developers
I prefer the KDE view where they seems to have the extreme opposite view ‘lack of configurability is a burden for the users’
For me the current keyboard (terminal version) works very fine in the Librem5 
– I can see here how it can be improved for others – but I’m a bit atypical as I’m not used to IOS nor Android keyboards
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I don’t think that does justice to GNOME. With dconf/Gsettings there are many things configurable. If not, there are the shell extensions which can let you modify anything within GNOME shell. Okay, the extensions often break with new releases but there is work ongoing to improve that and after a short time they get mostly fixed anyhow.
Far from me the intention to do bad justice to GNOME, as I’m not really a fan of it, I can only represent it poorly
But if the say ‘configurability is a burden’ among the GNOME folks then it explain a lot
GNOME is not my project, so I have no say to what direction they want with it, or how they do things
More configurations means more code, more bugs, more entanglements to solve, more security exposure, more time consuming, bad architecture choices will make you go back in time, …etc
So yes, I agree that it’s a burden for developers, but in the end, the lack of configuration becomes a burden for users
(that more the point I wanted to make rather than a rant on GNOME)
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There is the principle of “convention over configuration” meaning that there are well chosen defaults (e.g. are good for most people without changes) but settings can be changed if needed.
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I think at this stage of the game most Librem 5 users won’t care whether configuration has to be done using a command line interface rather than a GUI, or has to be done directly in dconf-editor, as long as there is good documentation over what needs to be done.
That’s the thing. If you have n on-off switches in the configuration then there are 2n sets of settings to test - and that rapidly becomes “never going to happen” - and some sets of settings just won’t work even when they do get tested - so it becomes difficult to understand for users and poorly documented.
That means configuration options are ideally specified to be “orthogonal” i.e. independent in function, and ideally independent in implementation, to reduce interactions in the code.
As an illustration of the challenges, on the iPhone, with suggested completions out of line, the first completion is usually what you typed even when it is not in the dictionary and touching that has the effect of suppressing auto-correct i.e. I am typing a word that is not in the dictionary and I know what I am doing.
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I’ll add my vote for the ability to turn off any and all forms of auto-correct and word suggestions, or for an alternative keyboard or keyboard layout that doesn’t include them to be available as standard, in the package repository. This is a basic accessibility feature that I would expect from any phone.
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Is it possible to type diacritical characters on the Librem5?
(It would be weird if not. So, I guess it is.)
I have installed both the Dutch keyboard with “Sun dead keys” (whatever that may mean) and the English Int. keyboard with “AlGr dead keys” (because this sounds a bit like the good old US International keyboard with dead keys that worked so well on ‘traditional’ computers).
Neither gives the hoped for results.
So, your advice would be most welcome.
One solution is to install a layout (or layouts) in the language that includes the diacritical characters you need, then switch the keyboard language on the fly. (Changing the language also affects the Terminal keyboard.) Or you could make your own, using the squeekboard layout guide (search the forum).
There is also the Characters app, with lots of symbols and extra emojis, as well as Character Map, with different symbols and letters. These are not as convenient to use as switching keyboards, but they provide some extra options.
Sounds somewhat cumbersome, to be honest. Specially because I have been used to the dead-key-approach for decades. Even my ever so obsolete Windows Phone has a dead-key-keyboard.
But I will look into it for sure.
Thanks.
Is there any chance a swipe style keyboard is in the works?
that would be dandy!