Thumbkey is a great project for me. But I think that the issue of creating keyboards and variants should be more controlled perhaps by the creator. There are so many variants that it can be confusing at times. Who tells me that the Spanish version of Thumbkey that has moved keys over the original version is the correct one or even the original would not be better just adding the necessary diacritics and the ñ. Many may tell me: "Well, you create your variant and that's it," but with that there would only be another variant to confuse a new person who arrives. Perhaps over time a way to modify your keyboards locally could be added and perhaps share them if someone likes it similar to how 8vim does. But perhaps having every opinion on how the key layout should be in the official version as part of the official application is not the best idea.
There's a ticket for this, which has been rejected. The author believes a better approach is to keep adding variants for every minor change. I did make a comment essentially arguing your point, but @dessalines@lemmy.ml disagrees.
A good action would be to go to github and upvote the closed feature request, but I'm beginnig to believe the only option is to hard-fork the project so we can add this feature. I really hate hard forks, but sometimes it's the only option when there's such a fundamental disagreement.
Maybe if enough folks went and advocated for #586, @dessalines might be pursuaded.
I really hate forks in most of cases, because In most of cases it has the same effect as adding variants and more variants of the same keyboard without any further control that the Kotlin format is correct, because perhaps the arrangement of the letters is not correct, and of course a keyboard is not a mp3 player that you can try for a while and if you see that it is not the right one you change, changing keyboards requires a huge effort and affects muscle memory and is not a game. I used messagease for more than a decade and I didn't change it for anything. When I discovered thumb-key, what attracted me the most, besides of course being opensource, was that the developer commented that his new distribution was better than Messagease's, but from what I've seen, the only keyboard he maintains is the English version of Thumb-Key. key all the other versions are custom versions from someone who thought that this was the correct distribution for that other language without having provided any argument. Nor has that distribution been approved by the developer beyond that person having uploaded the kotlin file In correct format, there may already be a carrot in the letter "a" that the keyboard will be published as x language keyboard. And when someone else arrives and wants to put a tomato on the "i", there will be a keyboard that draws tomato emojis on the letter "i". Of course I understand the position of the developer who considers that in-app modification is not feasible for him, he is the owner of his time and he did a lot by contributing a keyboard like this to the community. But I also think that allowing every person who wants to make a new keyboard to change a key to do so is not the solution at all. and maybe control at least the variants of his own layout because when you open the keyboard you think or I at least thought that the layouts of his keyboard were his, not someone who decided to make the language variant on his own with or without any criteria. For example, I have seen that in French there are two thumb keys, which one starts with the keyboard? which is better? Are any of them supported by the developer or were they created by someone who put the letters by eye without really knowing what they were doing? I believe that this system only creates confusion and fills the list with often absurd layouts. But of course this is just my opinion.
Thumb key started with a pretty small amount of layouts. While creating a variant and PRing it might not be the cleanest solution, it definitely works. There have even been rejected open PRs adding in-app layout customizaiton (to some degree), and they were rejected mainly due to unnecessary complexity.
Here are my few main reasons I think the current system is fine:
- One of the only major downsides is that a new user might have a harder time finding the appropriate keyboard layout. However, if somebody is installing thumb-key, there's a 99% chance they're either a former MessagEase user (in which case they just select the MessagEase layout and continue with their life) or a curious person who is willing to experiment with a weird keyboard like this and try out 4 or 5 different layouts they find interesting. There are some ongoing discussions in the issues about a better naming scheme for the layouts, so new users can distinguish them better.
- Implementing a in-app layout modification system with good UX would be very time consuming, and the developer's main project is working on lemmy and the Jerboa app - I imagine there isn't really that much time left to sink in hours for such a big feature. Most, if not all "bigger" features like slide gestures were several PRs from several differennt people, sometimes over the span of months.
- Creating and maintaining your layout isn't that hard - it can even be done without android studio, and in 1-3-ish iterations over the course of a week or two you get a layout that you are likely to use for a long time (at least, that's how it was for me). Dessalines is, in my opinion, exceptionally quick in merging PRs and making new releases, so it's really not that bad.
