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MessagEase decided to go subscription-based, here's some alternatives

11 points by sciv ↗ HN
MessagEase[1] is an Excellent alternative keyboard for mobile that I've been using for years... but it's not very maintained, and the maker recently decided to go subscription-based in a very messy way[2].

As an alternative I found thumb-key[3], which provides the same basic idea but the differences BREAK MY BRAIN and after some back-and-forth with the dev I realized that he doesn't intend to bridge the gap. So I decided to fork it and implement the features myself[4]. If someone knows Kotlin and is interested, any help will be appreciated =)

Another alternative I found is Unexpected Keyboard[5], someone made a MessagEase-like layout[6], but it's the same problem of your brain breaking because of missing or misplaced things, so this one is also a no-go for me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase

[2] https://twitter.com/_ragingdawn/status/1753840734602686825

[3] https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

[4] https://github.com/asdkant/open-thumb

[5] https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

[6] https://lemmy.ml/post/7576039

11 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 38.6 ms ] thread
rsaarelm
Thanks for the post. I had also been using MessagEase for years and was blindsided by the popup and confused how there's almost nothing about it online. So now I'm googling for messagease stuff from the last week and found my way here, I guess this thread is buried and invisible on actual HN.

I jumped over to thumb-key for now and am treating the brain-breakage as just some healthy neuroplasticity exercise since I'm not very serious about mobile typing.

silverdrake11
I was looking into thumb-key. What differences are there? I noticed the same layout is available
Nullabillity
1. Thumb-key intentionally doesn't support gestures other than basic taps and swipes. MessagEase uses these quite heavily for "borrowing" keys from other layers without having to switch to them.

2. Thumb-key bakes a lot of decisions into the layout. If you're a pure english-speaker then you tend to have a decent variety of layouts available, but as a swede, having to choose between having Å/Ä/Ö available, having convenient access to special symbols, or having convenient access to numbers is a bit of a non-starter, especially when there is no actual conflict in the layout.

Moru
As also a swede I find some keys are forgotten in the swedish layout. The letters aren't in our alphabet but that does not mean we don't use ü, é, à and such. And I find no way of doing dead keys in Thumb-key. Maybe there will be more donations to fuel some additions to Thumb-key now thanks to MessagEase sudden rentseeking.

Will definitely donate, I'm not pro subscription. Especially not this way, locking in users by waiting for them to learn your keyboard layout and then lock the keyboard behind a paywall.

rsaarelm
I realized I had an old apk installed and grabbed the newest thumb-key from the site, and it does indeed have a ME-compatible layout now so I don't need to relearn everything. Not having gesture-based capitalization still irks me though.
Nullabillity
After also running into issues with thumb-key (primarily: the quite primitive gesture recognition) I ended up starting a rewrite of my own.[0] It's still very far from the polish of MessagEase or even thumb-key, but it is getting to the point where I can mostly daily-drive it, and it does already support U and O gestures.

[0]: https://github.com/nightkr/flickboard

stragulus
Nice! Watching this. I started something myself but don't move quite as fast.
azzentys
Thanks for this thread. It's sad that I will have to switch to another keyboard.
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racuna
I'm also interested in this. MessageAse was my daily driver keyboard until some bugs appeared, then I switched to Multiling O (here's my messagease inspired layout https://github.com/racuna/multiling-o-esbr ) but is also abandoned with not fixed bugs.

Now I'm using thumb-key as my daily keyboard but waiting for them to add more features, or just jump to another keyboard app.

dzcello
Very interested! In using it, and helping if I am able. I don't know anything about Kotlin or coding Android apps. But if I have time I might dive into it.

I really think we have to thank Exideas for going subscription-only so as to spark the community into developing an open-source replacement. I suppose this wasn't their intent----though if not, I can't really fathom what it was, since they're going to lose almost all of their user base, and so generated minimal revenue from subscriptions.

I haven't tried thumb-key, but I'll give it a go, and see what I feel is missing. I have to say I'm turned off by the name, since I don't generally use my thumbs :)