Any suggested layouts for mobile prose

q335r49

First time twiddler user, and a few days in and I'm realizing that the default isn't all that great. For example,

the "i" is extremely common but hard to get to, while I almost never use the delete key, which is unchorded.
the numbers are very hard to get to, and alternating letters and numbers seem frequently used (passwords, usernames, eg)
Took me forever to find out where the "@" key was!

Any opinions or insights as to whether to slowly roll my own based on the default config, or to adopt a particular premade config? Primary use case would be prose on a mobile phone (messaging, emailing, form filling, note-taking, etc.)

Tony

q335r49 Took me forever to find out where the "@" key was!

In Tuner, just search for the keystroke(s) you are looking for in the Action Filter :

Geoff

I'd recommend going with a premade config. Naturally, I'm going to plug my own. Towards the bottom of this page you'll see visualisations of some of the more popular layouts that might help you decide.

Only issue is that I'm not aware of any custom layouts yet available for the new firmware. I've a support ticket open for a suspected bug with multi character chords that is breaking mine - hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

q335r49

Geoff Oh wow, brilliant. I was just thinking about updating Tabspace with the bigram counts to try to generate a more prose-centric layout than backspice but looks like you had a far more sophisticated approach. You've got another acolyte. Hopefully the multi-char fix gets pushed soon.

Btw, what is your primary use case scenario? I'm trying to recreate my "halo" typing experience, which is, looking out the window of the light rail while typing prose on a blackberry priv thumboard. Unfortunately the mobile keyboard is now even more dead than it was 5 years ago.

q335r49

Tony Ah thanks, I was trying to do Ctrl-F on the webpage. Didn't realize those were filters boxes.

Geoff

q335r49 thanks for the kind words. My use case? I suppose I want to type without having to think about it. Fast but not complex. Not too much to remember, nothing to look at. Mostly prose, some code, lots of editing for both. My right hand has some tendon damage so regular keyboards don't work for me.

Perhaps a few highlights:

I won a short story competition! I was the only non professional writer, and I wrote it on my phone.
I work from home: when my kids were babies they napped in a sling on my chest while I worked.
I journal or write while walking back from dropping my daughter off to school.

Have you checked out the headless mode? Think it's called untethered rechording now. You can run a Twiddler without it connected to anything: it records your keystrokes and has them available for playback later.

q335r49

Geoff Great to hear! That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for -- "typing without thinking about it" for note taking, especially without having to stare at the screen. It's hard to beat the complement of thinking + some sort of memory device, be that paper / journal, audio / recorder, or keyboard / text, for any sort of intellectual production. The headless mode is intriguing as a memory bank of daily notes and I might experiment with that later. There is the feeling that the mere act of writing is somehow enough to anchor thoughts without needing the constant feedback of a display / paper.

But, that is pretty much my current / anticipated use case as well. I was sold on the twiddler last night as I was typing in the dark (albeit very slowly) while carrying the infant in a baby carrier. Childcare leaves one with just tons of down time, waiting at the park, walking them to sleep or whatnot, that could be better used than endlessly scrolling YouTube or Facebook, which is what I'm doing now. I'm thinking of possibly having an arm-mounted mobile device carrier of some sort + twiddler to try to bring me back to form, somewhat, in terms of production.

Geoff

q335r49 Congrats on parenthood! My top advice: be kind to yourself if sleep deprivation throws these plans out of whack for a while.

I sometimes use an old Android app called Type and Speak. It's no longer on the app store unfortunately. It reads words aloud while you type them which is useful as a monitor alternative. If you use a pram, you can get a phone mount for it.

You might like my current expansion plan for my layout: I'm adding chords for the 100 most common words, with an ultimate goal of having chords for the top 300 English words. So the layout 'levels' would be:

Learn to type individual letters
Press the letters of common bigrams and trigrams together to output those -grams, typing faster
Press Ctrl + a bigram or trigram to output a whole word with a space (e.g. Ctrl + 'th' gets 'that ', Ctrl + 'pl' gets 'people ')

q335r49

Geoff Thanks for the advice, the infancy phase is definitely rough but fortunately the boy seems to be easier than his sisters. And thanks for the app recommendation.

After experimenting with Oran for a bit I think the layout is still a bit too advanced for me moving from a keyboard. I'm thinking about to develop a rearrangement of the default config, of just the alphabet keys, that would be more bigram friendly, i.e., could easily type the most frequent bigrams with alternating fingers.

I'm trying to play with your powershell printer script, but it's giving me this error:

You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.
At C:\Users\q335r\Desktop\twiddler-layout-printer-main\TwiddlerLayoutPrinter.psm1:68 char:45

... $Path | Where-Object { $_.Chord.StartsWith($NoModifierKeysPrefix) } |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (🙂 [], RuntimeException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvokeMethodOnNull

I'm not too experienced in powershell, but is it possible the csv file for twiddler 4 is incompatible with this script?

Geoff

Ah! Sounds like you're ahead of me in parenthood experience. (I've one boy, one girl.)

There's a lot to be said for designing your own layout. I did something similar to your approach before settling on Oran: I took a left hand only Dvorak layout designed for regular keyboards and tried to reimagine it for the Twiddler. After that, it's just a case of looking up frequent bigrams and seeing what's easy to put in.

I also tried one based on Qwerty for a blind friend of mine: he wanted to have the twelve buttons mapped as follows:
q w e r
a s d f
z x c v
then we had the concept of a mirror button to get the other half of the keyboard
u i o p
j k l ;
m , . /
Think we reversed the order. At that point muscle memory greatly reduced the learning curve, but the disadvantage was some of the combos became quite unwieldy. Mind you, you could now use a thumb button for mirroring and it's possible to use multiple buttons in the same row to hit bigrams: it could be worth revisiting if you're looking for an approach.

Bigrams (or more specifically multi keystroke chords) aren't working on the T4 at present. I've had a support request open since last Friday on it. Hopefully they'll have this fixed in the time it takes you to learn the individual character typing, so no need to wait.

I'm afraid my PowerShell layout printer only works for the old chord notation. I'm unlikely to have a chance to look at it for the next month or so but I'll post here if I get it working.