Shift-key shortcuts

[ziggycross]

Love this keyboard, great work!

One thing I'm missing from KaiOS is the use of the * key and a number to quickly type special characters. Here is a video that demonstrates this: YouTube

For example, *3 is used to write ?, *4 is used to write !, etc.

I love being able to quickly change the casing with the shift key currently, but I feel it would be better to have this feature assigned to a long press of *, with a single press to be used for special characters. The current long press to open the command palette could be reassigned to a long press of #.

I find this is significantly faster than using the 0 or 1 key along with the directional buttons, or is there a faster way to add special characters which I don't know about?

This is a feature I would be interested in working on, but might take me some time. Let me know what you think.

[sspanak]

Well, first, you can assign all function to all keys any way you want from Settings -> Keypad -> Select Hotkeys. You can also rearrange the punctuation characters from the Settings, to be able to access the most frequently used ones easier. Also, don't forget you can scroll back, so typing "?" is equivalent to pressing 1-Left and which is no different than typing on KaiOS. Typing "!" is equivalent to: 1-Left-Left, which is a little more effort than KaiOS, but still acceptable in my opinion.

However, what you want is not possible. There are two problems with it.

Currently, true to the Nokia spirit, pressing a numeric key when punctuation is displayed, accepts the current punctuation mark and immediately allows you to start typing the next word. This is very useful and I don't want to take it away. Potentially, there can be a "special char palette" that has pages and work similar to KaiOS.

The second problem is, there are multiple punctuation sets for the different languages. You can see them here. This means the KaiOS method must be adapted to support all of them.

In summary, I do not plan to work on this, but if you find a convenient way of doing, please open a PR. I will review it and if it looks and works well, I will consider including it in TT9.

[ziggycross]

Thanks for the thoughtful response, these are all very good points. Personally I just find the directional keys harder to use than the main T9 keys on my device, but I understand this is a personal preference. I have been using the left trick :)

The special char palette is definitely along the lines of what I was thinking, I see this being a good optional feature for those transferring from KaiOS, I'm sure some people would prefer to not have it.

I will consider contributing when I have the time.

[sspanak]

In #873, I've provided a short technical summary how to implement such a feature. If anyone wants to have a try, please see there. Typing a specific character requires calling onText(), which is exactly the same as executing any other internal command.

My statement is still the same - I do not plan to work on any such features.

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This issue is stale because it is marked as 'duplicate', 'wontfix' or 'invalid' and there has been no activity in the past 30 days.

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This issue was closed because it has been inactive for 14 days since being marked as stale.