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Ask HN: Swipe to *Code* Keyboard?

3 points by tempaccount420 ↗ HN
Is there a swipe to code keyboard that's casing aware, identifier aware, "';[]+ symbol-aware, etc.?

I feel like what's missing for me to be able to use my phone or iPad for development is a good keyboard, maybe like one of those old slide out keyboards, but those are not made anymore :( Even so, swipe to code could potentially be faster than using a physical portable keyboard.

Clicks is also interesting, though it doesn't have separate keys for symbols like `;`, that's common with those tiny keyboards.

Combined with AI autocompletion (Copilot) and remote VS Code (already possible with Blink or just a browser), I feel like coding on a touch device could be made comfortable. It doesn't have to be as painful as it is right now.

5 comments

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Terr_
I haven't heard of any, but it sounds like an interesting idea, particularly if it opens things up on the accessibility front.

However there's a big difference between a "generic English swipe keyboard" which can be calibrated to a single dictionary used in many places, versus a swipe keyboard that might have to offer very different suggestions based on the current programming-language and on what variable or method names exist within a given scope.

If you had a swipe keyboard tailored for one language, that'll only help complete common keywords and core APIs, but any real project will have a lot of "new words" that it won't know without some deeper IDE-ish system.

tempaccount420
> might have to offer very different suggestions based on the current programming-language and on what variable or method names exist within a given scope

I guess you could make it part of an application that embeds (a browser for) VS Code, with which the keyboard code can communicate and receive this information from.

You could almost build it on top of a generic English swipe keyboard if you treat a swipe to shift (for camelCase) or `_` for snake_case as word separators, to match them in isolation to a generic English dictionary, and once the user presses space, you can try to match the fullIdentifierWithAllWords against a dictionary from the editor/LSP.

LorenDB
It's too bad the company behind the F(x)tec Pro¹ seems to have disappeared. Otherwise, it'd be the perfect slide phone for you to check out. It even supported Ubuntu Touch, which could have enabled you to run a full-fat Linux development environment.

You could also pick up a PinePhone with the clamshell keyboard attachment (although for some reason I can't find the keyboard on the Pine64 store).

tempaccount420
Thanks for the recommendation. I like the aspect of freeing up the screen space that a separate, attached or slide out keyboard provides.
seabass-labrax
> You could also pick up a PinePhone with the clamshell keyboard attachment (although for some reason I can't find the keyboard on the Pine64 store).

I believe it was recalled due to risk of fire. There are batteries in both the keyboard and the PinePhone, yet the USB-C controller used for charging was not designed to support such a use-case (in which the PinePhone is being powered from two sources simultaneously).

https://pine64.org/2022/05/31/may-update-worth-the-wait/#pin...