What are some helpful resources to learn to touch type on smartphones?

ALostInquirer@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 42 points –

I can touch type with a physical keyboard, which helps somewhat with trying to type on smartphone virtual keyboards, but I still find myself way clumsier and error-prone on them when I try to touch tap-type on them.

For the most part I've worked around this via swipe/gesture-typing on virtual keyboards, but even that method is error-prone. So, I'd like to try to learn to tap-type similar to how I know how to touch type, but many resources I find are for physical keyboards instead, so...Any help here?

45

You are viewing a single comment

I know it looks difficult, but if you already touch type on PC then Minuum is a great mobile keyboard. You just have to train yourself to not try being precise with it (impossible to do quickly). I actually find it easier to use if I don't look at it while I'm typing. I've been using it since it was on Indiegogo and haven't seen anything else worth trying. I'm pretty sure you can even get it for free now.

Note that it does learn from you over time, so the more you use it the more accurate it becomes.

In the above image, I've put the cursor back on the word "accurate" for a little demo. The first group of letters are the ones that I actually hit. After that are Minuum's guesses in order of probability of being correct.

If you want to type a word that isn't in its dictionary yet, you can swipe up from the top row to bring up a full keyboard. Selecting the word once it's typed usually adds it, though for some reason they've excluded swears from that.

That is so wild! I love the inventiveness of human interface devices. Too bad it isn't FOSS, it'd be nice to see it in fdroid.

Wait!? Is Minuum back?! I thought the developer abandoned it?

I just checked the play store after seeing this comment. Apparently it hasn't been updated since February of 2017, but it works just fine.

I actually still had it installed and seeing you mention it promoted me to try it again.

I was so hoping it had been resurrected by the dev because it's such a neat keyboard.