No love for the Hacker's Keyboard (Android)? It's invaluably helpful for sending ASCII Control characters (when on an SSH session, for instance).<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...</a>
Anybody else uncomfortable with the fact that these drop-in keyboard replacements are effectively sanctioned keyloggers that send keystrokes to a remote server?
For Android, I really like SwiftKey, and have been using it for years. Its predictions are very accurate and it (un)learns very quickly.<p>But since the last updates (maybe when they added emojis? I'm not sure) it has become laggy and unresponsive, sometimes I end typing a phrase and have to wait several seconds while I see the text painfully appearing one letter at a time in the screen. Also there is a period of 1-2 seconds after I send a message when I can't press any key, as it will be ignored. I don't use Flow.<p>However, it has something that I can't find in any other keyboard: two simultaneous languages. Every keyboard allows to select several languages and change between them, but in SwiftKey they work at the same time and you can use both seamlessly, and for me that's irreplaceable.
Slightly OT: I installed SwiftKey (currently the top option under iOS on this website), and I really like the concept (would at least like to try it out, even though I've developed a pretty good proficiency with two-thumb typing), but I don't like the fact that it's hard to re-do/correct the last word. I can either type slowly, which defeats the point of the keyboard, or type quickly and have to do the slow process of backspacing the last word and re-swiping it (which slows you down a lot).<p>Is there some magic gesture I'm missing, or is there a different third-party keyboard that has a similar idea but is better in this regard? I'm tempted to pay the $1 for Swype but I don't want to bother to do that and then discover it has similar problems.
Hey all, we make one of the keyboards on the list, Minuum. It has been really fun to see the iOS community jumping on to third party keyboards so whole-heartedly.<p>I'm curious, since I've never really asked the HN community about this: what do hackers look for in a virtual keyboard? We all have strong opinions on optimizing our hardware keyboards, (I suspect HN has one of the highest proportions of DVORAK users out there) but I've seen less debate for soft keyboards.<p>Software keyboards have the potential to be much more flexible and customizable than hardware ones, is this something that we want or need? Is lack of a good coding keyboard the thing that stops us from really writing code on a tablet?
Slightly off topic but I have been less than impressed with iOS 3rd-party keyboards compared to their Android counterparts. I noticed they take a bit longer to load and are really inconsistent on when they load. Open AppA, get stock. Open AppB, get Swiftkey. etc. On my wife's iPhone 5 she just wouldn't get a keyboard at all sometimes.
You might want to replace the screenshots of the Android keyboards - you're using the screenshots of the cross-platform keyboards running on iOS devices, and they look different when running on Android devices.
PerfectKeyboard for Android? I use it daily thanks to the T9 layout (not sure if that's the correct name for it, but the old Nokia style phonepad layout)
Am I the only one uncomfortabke with a third party managing my keyboard? I wish Android had a sane security policy for keyboard controls but they don't.
Why is it that iOS8 already has more fun and quirky keyboards?<p>Android keyboards have been around for much longer and you'd expect them to be more competitive surely.