The 'sidebar' on the main-keyboard should be configurable to be visible either on the left or right side of the x-board.

left->circle movement pastes the content but since you are inevitably going to lift the finger, a space is introduced. it's a pain to paste passwords.

Currently the keyboard view is not updated instantly as soon as the configuration changes. To view the changes, you need to either

1. switch the phone to landscape mode and back OR
2. switch to a different keyboard and back.

This needs to be fixed, the keyboard view needs to be updated as soon as any configuration changes.
A requirement for this would be to be able to communicate between the 'InputMethodService' derived class in our code base to the Activity where the configuration changes are taking place.

Ending a gesture outside the circle (to avoid auto-spacing) should not trigger the control functions associated with each quadrant.

   2
   v
3 > < 1
   ^
   4

For example, the letter 's' is center->2->3->center. The natural extension of this gesture would be to continue to quadrant 1. Currently, ending a drag in (1) tries to move the cursor to the right. Most of the time the cursor is at the end of a line and this does nothing, but other letters such as 'y' or 'g' or 'h' have the cursor moving backwards into the word we just typed. Quadrant 2 (move to the beginning of the line) is even more disruptive.

If you could squeeze an icon near the emoji icon in the side bar, and have that take you to programmable slots to enter custom text for easy access like: .com, email address, or anything else used frequently.

I'm envisioning something similar to the implementation in Kboard: https://github.com/adgad/kboard

So:

• tap new icon
• tap blank field
• add custom text (like .com for easy access)
• tap custom text to change or delete

Thanks for all your work and all you do. Fantastic app.

Possibly related to #54

Remove to unused dummy buttons from the settings UI.

It might be interesting to see the trail of movement as the user types on the keyboard.

A setting should be available to show or hide such tail.

Right now the UI for the keyboard is grotesque.

Any suggestions, any help is more than welcome.

for 8Vim, in the landscape mode the textfield should be shown on one side of the screen and the keyboard should be shown on another side. This side should be configurable by the user as he/she might prefer left or the right hand.

We already check if the 8vim keyboard has been activated on the system when the user opens up the settings UI.
We should also prompt the user to switch to 8vim when the user is playing with the keyboard settings.

So, just like the activation check, show the user a message that he might want to select 8vim as the current keyboard with two buttons -

1. Switch - in this case display the inputMethodPicker and let the user switch the keyboard

                InputMethodManager imeManager = (InputMethodManager)getApplicationContext().getSystemService(INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
                imeManager.showInputMethodPicker();

2. Dismiss - Simply dismiss the dialog box.

The keyboard should be able to support candidate view as the user is typing text into a field, the number of suggestion would be 3 as was in 8Pen. Also selection of a candidate can happen in 2 ways, either touching the candidate directly or as was in 8Pen, you move your finger from the circle to the sector (left, right and top only) and then back in the circle.

The current UI for the settings applications is very unorganized. As part of the task we at-least need to decide on the design and look for the settings UI. A wire-frame should be ready to close this task.

The size of the centre circle on the keyboard should be configurable from the settings options.

Alt button is one of the least used keys on the main-keyboard. We should replace it with the settings key so that when pressed the settings-ui should open up.

I've had a crazy idea, whilst being unhappy with the placement of the character 'y' on the keyboard, which at least in my mother language doesn't get used very much.

What if we could define smoothness of a gesture (finger movement, mathematically a discrete curve) and give it, with the input being a ton of text from books, articles, websites, ..., to a machine learning algorithm, that would try different layouts of the characters to find the ultimate best one that accomplishes most common bigrams or whole words in smooth, flowing gestures. What I mean by that is that you wouldn't need to change the direction of the movement of your finger much (e.g. typing 'no' on the current layout).

What are your opinions on this? I might take this as a project that I would do in my free time. (which is not guaranteed to exist...)

Search bars (or certain other kind of fields) in some applications don't accept 'enter' as the finishing command. The keyboard needs to change it's behavior according to the expected input-sub-type.

Hi! Thanks for making this clone, I wanted to check it out but the f-droid link seems to be broken.

What's the correct link?

Currently, the sectors are blank on the X-board and for a new user there is no way of knowing that the bottom sector is for 'enter' or the top sector acts as a shift/caps-lock button or the right sector acts as a backspace button etc.

The symbols should be at-least displayed for a better UI.

When I press the Resize/Emojis/Sounds/Gestures buttons in the app, nothing happens.

the position of the circle should be configurable in the settings screen.
The user should be able to move around the centre point on the keyboard canvas to best suit his/her needs.

The edges of vi8 are clipped off making out difficult to guess words at the periphery.

Since 8Vim has a paste functionality already, it would be really good if a full clipboard manager can be supported from the keyboard directly.

I am unsure about how this functionality should be accessed. Any suggestions are welcome.

Currently, to add a space, the finger has to be lifted on the dot. This has the disadvantage, that you need to lift up the finger to start writing the next word.

It may feel more natural if there's a loop users could use to insert a space without having to lift their finger. People could then write whole sentences in one swipe.

8Vim should be able to support all emoji's as specified in Unicode specification 9.

This keyboard might get a larger following if it is listed on F-Droid.

Thanks for your work on this keyboard.

How to reproduce:

1. Start in Center
2. Move to left sector
3. Move to bottom sector
4. Move to right sector
5. Instead of moving to the center (which would result in letter "h"), move back to bottom sector
6. Move back to center

→ Actual behaviour: No letter is written, continuing without lifting finger has no effect, no more letters are written.
→ Expected behaviour: Letter "i" is written, continuing without lifting finger writes the letters according to the movement.

Note: The expected behaviour is according to the original 8pen app (the full keyboard can still be tested in the 8pen game when pressing the two arrows on the bottom right of the level selection screen). And for me personally it's the most intuitive behaviour.

This still puzzles me: The Sidebar-Left / Sidebar-Right buttons in 8Vim don't seem to do anything. I feel like they used to, but now it seems somewhat random whether they do something.

I suggest, that upon button-press, the keyboard should IMMEDIATELY be restructured.

If other settings have a similar delayed effect, also make them immediately effect the keyboard.

Vim has a very powerful feature of macros, where as a user I am free to compose a complicaced editing command and save it as a macro to be used at lesiure.

For example, suppose you want to go back 1 letters and insert 'zz' (don't ask me why!) you should be able to do that with a : jizz

And there you go... that should do it. For whatever reason, if you want to save your 'jizz'... macros is the place for it.

https://github.com/adgad/kboard implements such a feature so might be a good point to start.

First task of CI would be to setup code linter on to the project.

8Vim should be able to support Emoji's.

Emoji's should be accessible from any keyboard by long-pressing the Enter key.

EmojiOne should be the set supported for a start.

I would say this is probably a low priority thing, but in the absence of a game to practice the keyboard with, it might be nice if the app has a Learning Mode.

It would look something like:

• open 8Vim app
• Select option for Learning Mode (among the other settings for "sidebar left" or "emoji keyboard" or "resize circle")
• learning mode would have different levels where Level 1 might only populate the keyboard with letters "a t n o i s y e"
• learning mode could give a list of words to practice like no, to, yes (this option could easily be left out since people can come up with their own words to test with the given letters)
• learning mode would allow you to practice in the "test your keyboard here" field

Edit: Learning mode would only be applicable to the 8Vim app. If the user left the app without turning off learning mode, the full keyboard will be displayed and usable in other apps

When I press the emoji button

The keyboard switches to the next keyboard I have installed. I don't think this is intended. I guess this happens because the keyboard crashes and the system just loads be next one that is installed as fallback.

I'm using the app version iteration-2, which is offered here: https://f-droid.org/packages/inc.flide.vim8/
On a Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro, running MIUI 12.0.1.0 (Android 10).

This is a publicly available video of potential speed that can be obtained as shown on the old 8pen keyboard.

This is not me in the video.

Putting this here to help others get an idea about potential.

https://youtu.be/tFNCiOVks2w

Currently, long pressing the backspace deletes letters consecutivly, we would rather like to delete words in this case.
This should be configurable as well from settings.

The sidebar should be more like a side drawer, allowing user to enter more obscure button into the text field.

Based on input sub type of the text field, directly open the numbers keypad.

When an input field receives focus and the IME starts, the system calls onStartInputView(), passing in an EditorInfo object that contains details about the input type and other attributes of the text field. In this object, the inputType field contains the text field's input type.

The inputType field is an int that contains bit patterns for various input type settings. To test it for the text field's input type, mask it with the constant TYPE_MASK_CLASS, like this:
inputType & InputType.TYPE_MASK_CLASS

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/text/creating-input-method

When I open the app and press one of these 4 buttons,

nothing happens.

I'm using the app version iteration-2, which is offered here: https://f-droid.org/packages/inc.flide.vim8/
On a Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro, running MIUI 12.0.1.0 (Android 10).

gesture "top-> center" should hide the keyboard

The user should have a choice to configure the keyboard height to manage the screen real estate.

Currently the emoji keyboard selection dialog in the UI does not show any keyboard selected when the dialog opens. This makes sense for the first time, but is not correct when the user had selected one earlier. Make sure the item is pre selected if the user had made a selection ever before.

Cursor movement emulation should only be possible when starting in the circle and moving to a sector.
Cursor movement emulation should not be possible when some letters were already written and the finger was not lifted since then.

Example:

I want to write "Hello", so I start in the center, move left, move down, move right, move back to the circle, without lifting the finger I move down, left, back to the circle, without lifting finger I move down. Now because I forgot, I wait some time to check where I actually have to move to, but because I am waiting, the keyboard interprets that as Move Cursor Down (Circle > Down > Wait).

It's kind of hard to explain, I hope you get what I mean. Please tell me if you need a better explanation... xD

Please add a night mode theme

Hey,

thanks for the app!

Could you add NoveKey stile input as well? Like demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br4GbhAEiL4

The app would be even a little bit more efficient if it started in upper case mode and the mode would switch to uppercase automatically after a period and space was just written.

This behaviour should preferably be enabled/disabled in a settings menu.

Hi, it would be nice if the user could define an own layout.

Different languages have different letters and letter combinations that are frequently used.
E.g. in German we use "sch" quite often. With the current layout that is optimised for English, this combination is a bit awkward/inefficient to write because S and C are opposite on the same line.

Also different languages might have additional letters that currently are not available.
E.g. in German we use the umlauts (äöü) quite often. Swedish also uses umlauts and the å character. Etc.

Maybe the character set/layout could be defined with configuration files that will be read by the app. That way the community could provide layouts.

When tapping the top quadrant to switch in or out of shift modes, the on-screen letter previews don't switch to their shifted or unshifted versions.

Re-displaying the circle keyboard is enough of a refresh to get the correct characters - For example, hiding the on-screen keyboard and subsequently re-selecting a text field, or entering the edit controls screen and then returning to the circle.

At least in the Play Store (and I think in the app itself), there's no link to 8Vim's GitHub-page. (https://github.com/flide/8VIM)

I suggest fixing that, so that more people know where to post their ideas and/or bugs.

Application icon needs to be changed to referenced image. The image is in svg, and should be used either as is or should be converted to android vector graphic.
Image should not be converted to any fixed resolution format.

Uploaded the image to fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/images/8vim_icon.svg

In some scenarios, enter or backspace get perpetually pressed even if the keyboard is no longer visible. It makes the phone behave very strange. Make sure that the 8vim is not able to send any key if the keyboard ui is not visible.