Russian layout: default variants for symbols offered if you hold a key are frustrating

[Maykeye]

For most buttons if I hold a key in Russian layout, default alternative symbol offered goes from "used rarer than once per year" to "never used" making actually everyday used symbols frustrating to type

For version 3.5:

In 4 decades of my life I needed ѳ exactly zero times. Yet now every time email to be written, if Russian happened to be selected, ѳ pops up as the default variant and to get @ I need to get select it to the right of ѳ because sane defaults dont exist

Same goes for every vowel. heliboard prefers for default extremely rarely used stressed variants: Ю́,я́,и́,э́,о́,а́,ы́ over useful symbols that heliboard itself shows on the keyboard (eg for ю it shows >)

It's worse in case digit row is disabled: 1234ё67890 makes no sense. While ё is useful, not to the degree "let's destroy effortless digits typing" In English layout if I hold u I get 7 by default, not û.

[vipaoL]

Well, what's even stranger is that the symbols that are visible in hints are not the first ones...

See "@" hint Long press Get "ѳ"

See "?" hint Long press Get "ъ"

Hints are correct, but the symbols that pop up on long press aren't

[Helium314]

You can adjust the order and which symbols are used in hint and popup (select hint source and select popup order).

[vipaoL]

You can adjust the order and which symbols are used in hint and popup (select hint source and select popup order).

Well, I can make the behavour more predictable and reliable by making the two orders the same (the optimal for now is "number row, symbols, language (priority)". But these extra layouts are just a mess...

• "Layout" has "<", ">", "э́" (the letter doesn't exist in russian), "ъ" (on weird pos)
• "Language (priority)" has "ё" and "ъ" which are the only ones it shoud have I guess, but on a par with it, it also has a bunch of other useless letters: ѳ, ы́, а́, о́, я́, и́, ю́
• "Number row" and "symbols" are ok, "language" doesn't have any symbols at all

Well, ы́, а́, ю́ and others simillar ones may be useful for marking accent (or stress? Idk how to translate), but it's strange that they are in the same category with actually existing and commonly used letters (ё, ъ). It's also weird that "э́" is in not in the same category as the other letters with an accent. And it's strange that "<" and ">" are in "layout" but not in "symbols"

[Helium314]

< and > were added to the layout to recreate the old openboard layout as far as possible without having to do awkward things to the symbols layout. э́ and ъ on the russian layout were added in #1215, same goes for the "useless" letters. I guess someone saw a use.

"language" currently is only used for the show more letters with diacritics setting, which currently contains only latin characters.

[Maykeye]

"э́" (the letter doesn't exist in russian),

It's not a letter, just like ы́, а́, о́, я́, и́, ю́ are not a letter. They are combo of a letter and U+0301 aka Ćóḿb́íńíńǵ Áćút́é Áććéńt́ much to delight of #1067 (BTW, in the video attached there at 0:0ё timestamp, when the user holds e the digit 5 appears to be default, not ё)

ones may be useful for marking accent

And that's the issue. It's useless in 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the generic overall writing that is done on the phone(or computer), just as IPA is.

Overall they are useful two cases: if you decided to make a new article on some wikipedia or wiktionary, eg Э́тика (греч. ἠθική, от др.-греч. ἦθος — нрав, обычай). Keyword: "new". As can be seen in the linked article once in the word э́ is used to show how to to say the word, [vowel]' is not used anymore. For comparison *, which conflicts with я́, is used many times for bullet points.

Second case is when one wants to say it's "бо́льшая" (majority) / "больша́я" (big). Which happens.. what? From zero to several times per year? Context is usually enough to just use "большая".

Heck, overall the verbatim text "ударение на первый слог" (stress on the first syllable) is more often can be seen, written, heard and read than the special mark for that which dominates the keyboard.

(As for ѳ, when I saw it I thought it was Greek θ, which at least is used in physics and geometry so much in TeX a \theta can be found. Even in Russian texts I definitely saw more θ than ѳ: textbooks in schools use θ)

You can adjust the order and which symbols are used in hint and popup (select hint source and select popup order).

/dɪˈfɔlt ʃʊd biː seɪn/ (Defaults should be sane) Keyboards are for writing text. Text. Text is not a pronunciation. Text is the polar opposite of focusing on "stressing goes here". Changing the order manually doesn't make defaults sane, which they should be, just like typing i should (and does) give i, not ɪ. Once again comparison with video at #1067 at 0:0ё where (Russian) é is not default, and there are moments at 0:10, 0:11, 0:13: there are stressed vowels, but they don't take precedence over +, _, *. (Yes, even _ is seen as more important)