I hate tapping every single character of every single word on a virtual keyboard.
I like the way SwiftKey or recently Gboard provide swiping on the virtual keyboard on the screen (and the iPhones have that, too). You don’t type “w” “o” “r” “d” to have the word “word” appear, but you start with your finger on the letter “w” and move it on the screen over the rest of the letters)
Will there be a swipe feature (for the virtual keyboard of the Librem 5?
Does anybody know of any Linux libraries that could be used for this purpose?
I’d love to have that feature too, it is indeed a tremendous productivity booster. I don’t think (or I’d be very pleasantly surprised if) it’s part of the scope of the “1.0” milestone of the PureOS+phosh stack given the tight timeline, but I’m sure Dorota (see also https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-13/) and others on the Librem 5 team would be thrilled to have people helping with this (see https://developer.puri.sm/Volunteering/HowTo.html).
I’m not instinctively aware of libraries in the GNU+Linux platform that do this (and would be a bit surprised if there was; heck, even LineageOS and f-droid have nothing of the sort), but I haven’t looked/searched around, to be honest… so if anyone finds something on that front please feel free to share! Otherwise, well, that’s our job to do this together since we’re breaking new ground and there are lots of very smart people in the GNU/Linux community that would surely find it to be a nice challenge to tackle…
The key thing would be to process the gesture matching on the device itself instead of on a remote server, because otherwise the remote server can read (and store/copy) all your input.
I contacted the author of OKBoard and he is willing to port his work to Librem 5, but not before he actually holds his exemplar of Librem 5 in his hands.
I had a closer look at OKBoard and realised that only the frontend is in QT, the backend is a mixture of C++ libraries, Python code and even some Perl for tools and diagnostics.
Yay! I am interested in buying a Librem 5 and understand it will not be delivered until Q2 /2020.
Daniel’s request is also close to my heart. May I therefore please enquire whether since last year, the topic of gesture / swipe keyboard input has made its way up on the development agenda?
Thanks so much in advance for informing of what your thoughts / actions on this are meanwhile.
