As discussed, I made the switch on my phone to Graphene OS. One minor inconvenience was my keyboard. See, I'd long used Google's keyboard, even on my Samsung devices. The reason being, I was a swipe-typer.

If you've never tried it, it sounds kind of weird. Instead of tapping out the letters you want to type in, you touch the first letter and then keep your finger or thumb pressed down and slide across the keyboard to each subsequent letter, lifting up to signal the end of the word.

The secret sauce that makes this such a game changer, is that the keyboard app isn't necessarily paying hyper attention to exactly which characters you are hitting. It interprets the gesture/shape that you trace out, and figures out what word it could be. The result is, once you trust it to do so, you can type out words really, really quickly, because you just have to vaguely gesture in the shape of a word.

Like, the word "gesture" becomes G -> move up and right -> then down a bit -> then back up and right -> then just zig-zag left and right. Uh, writing that down, it doesn't sound so fast. But like, I just want to get across that you can just sort of hand-wave the shape (thumb-wave?) and it usually works fine. If the word is wrong, there's usually a few corrections suggested and the word you want is almost certainly in them.

Now, since I'm using Graphene and trying to get out of the Google ecosystem, the last thing I want to do is install the little Google app that sends everything you type into the cloud of doom. The built in Graphene keyboard is perfectly cromulent. But man, I really missed the swipe typing.

Enter FUTO. Open source, offline, Android keyboard, with support for swipe typing. Problem solved. But what motivated me to babble on here now, is I'm experimenting with their "swipe optimized layout": KASROZ.

So, like I said before, with swipe typing sometimes you end up making a gesture that could plausibly be interpreted as more than one word. Especially when you hit many letters on one row (as in the example on their explainer linked above, the words stream and steam - the swipe across the T-R-E vs. the swipe from T-E direct, can be hard to distinguish.) Or words with consecutive identical letters (booth vs. both), where you usually need to "pause" a bit on the o to get what you want. Plus other random collisions.^[1] I guess the idea behind this KASROZ layout is to lay the key out to minimize these sorts of problems.

Now, I'm generally willing to try weird things. My inner hipster nature. I was the guy doing his homework in 2002 using vi. Well, OK, vim, technically.^[2] I knew someone back then who went a bit further than me though, and was a DVORAK guy. I couldn't go that far. Even if you convinced me it was X% more efficent or whatever, there are more metrics in the world than efficiency.^[3] QWERTY wins because familiarity and interoperability have value to us as well, even if they only come because of historical accident. But if I sit down in front of a random computer, I wanna know that my typing skills will transfer.

Phones, on the other hand, are much more personal devices. Compared to keyboards, I'm almost never going to be using a stranger's phone to do more than snap a photo on their behalf. Certainly unlikely to be typing anything, and even if I were it would almost certainly not be of any length. So I figure, hey, why not get a bit weird with it.

I've been using KASROZ for a month or so now, and I'm really not sure about it.

The keys to swipe typing for me are:

• The QWERTY layout is effectively a primal muscle memory for me after 30+ years of typing with it
• Knowing that I don't have to be hyper-precise with the letters I input, because the interpeter will "know what I meant"

So obviously, the first problem in switching to KASROZ is losing all that muscle memory and going back to "hunt and peck". This is especially annoying in actual group chat situations where you are trying to keep up with a conversation, and I'm sitting there looking for the J key. And unlike a QWERTY keyboard where maybe I couldn't tell you off the top of my head the order of say, U-I-O-P, at least without thinking about it I mean, what I do know without thinking about it is that they're all vaguely "over there" (waves hands) And per point 2 above, that's good enough.

But what's worse is trying to find where the J key is while you are holding your fat thumb down on the phone keyboard blocking your view of half the letters because this is swipe-typing and so you have to keep your thumb held down or else the keyboard will think your word is done.

This effect is what really slows me down. Because I find myself having to plan ahead. If I want to type word, I find myself first mentally mapping out what the gesture will be, then executing it. If I start to swipe without thinking, I'll find myself halfway through a word and stuck.

Of course, with enough time, I suppose I should get better at it. I do notice some improvement. I find myself remembering certain key combos, for example. I-N-G is middle, up, left. Where the vowels are, in general. I keep wanting to look for the Z in a way out of the way location, like down where the J is, but I'm starting to remember that it's not. One of those things, "I remember it's not where I think it is because of how I remember how it's never where I think it is", I dunno if that makes sense. Maybe it's a me thing.

Also, while I can't pull them to mind at the moment, there are definitely word-pairs I've encountered that have tripped the keyboard up, just like stream vs. steam on a QWERTY. So maybe even the benefits are just moving around the error cases.

Anyway, I'm going to stick with it for at least another month or so. If I see real improvements, then great. Otherwise I'll probably give up and go back to QWERTY. Certainly wouldn't evangelize on behalf KASROZ yet, though. But swipe typing? Game changer, would never go back, highly recommended.

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1. My favourite (well, my least favourite and a source of constant annoyance) was that my phone would keep replacing my attempt at probably with the word pregnant, which makes for some funny typos if I don't catch it in time. And as someone who is a consumate wishy-washy-bet-hedger, you better believe I use the word probably a lot. ↩

2. Actually, I still am using it a bit these days. In fact, I'm writing the markdown that will be used to generate this post with it as we speak! ↩

3. Indeed, many of the world's problems can be laid at the feet of the altar to Efficiency. ↩