Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

[akdev1l]

Why we don’t have t9 support on tv remotes???

I gotta aim and peck some bullshit or open up some app with a QR code instead. Give me T9

[phatskat]

I can’t stand TV keyboard input, it’s wildly frustrating. I’d be happy even with “abc” style, T9 would be even better ofc.

I can kind of understand how we got here - a fractured system of various vendors, TV makers, and customized android implementations led us to apps having their own keyboards, even if the TV offers a native on-screen keyboard, and for some reason most of those are laid out in a keypad style with A in the top-left which goes against everything the majority of users have known, even back to typewriters.

I know my comment got longwinded, it’s just…things could have and should have gotten better by now, but I’ll be arsed if I’m gonna pull out my phone to type the four letters needed to scroll to the movie I’m looking for.

[mikepurvis]

Speaking of novel inputs, one of the only consistent uses of the PS4/5 controller's integrated trackpad is when games pop up a text input modal.

Always kind of saddened me there weren't more games that did interesting things with it, even things like scrolling around an overworld map.

[zzo38computer]

If you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed.

For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in that position, both are displayed.

So, this variant is you enter the entire title (or a substring of the title) first before it predicts what words you meant. After it is entered then all results are displayed, with a number next to each one, and then you must push the number corresponding to the one that you want.

[dsp_person]

smart tvs too busy adding spyware and AI bloat

maybe streamio + unified remote?

[ensignavenger]

I had a Vizio tv that just gave up the ghost on me. The remote had a full keyboard on the back! Best remote I have ever had. It ran the Yahoo connected TV platform. It was fantastic. (except the whole vizio spying on its customers thing... but the hardware and YTV platform were great!)

[stronglikedan]

Because that would require at least 8 dedicated buttons, instead of 5 buttons that can be used for other things when not in the keyboard context (dirs + enter). Of course, some manufacturers will sell you an upgraded remote separately to help make life easier.

[jimmaswell]

I've discovered you can just plug a keyboard and even mouse into smart TV's. Get a wireless keyboard with a trackpad on it and you barely need the remote anymore. The Windows key even brings me to the home screen by default on my LG C1.

[guywhocodes]

A few years ago I started building this. The idea was to send the word and when cycling send the same number of backspaces before the next.

I guess I got busy with other things

[throw0101c]

"Flip phone typing" = T9:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

[rfl890]

the library is named libt9, I believe the author is aware of this...

[humanfromearth9]

Blind-typing an SMS on a Nokia 3310 was so fast... or at least that was the feeling. I still regularly miss those keyboards, in particular when I hesitate between swiping a word or typing it, guessing how autocorrect will fail if I don't type... This never happened with my 3310, and there was no need for it at all.

[zxexz]

I used a flip phone for a ~week a couple months ago, I was amazed how fast T9 came back. Felt like riding a bike. I remember having a flip phone with a broken screen for a short while in the mid noughties, and being able to still make calls, send texts, change settings all from memory/muscle memory.

[bee_rider]

I bet it just felt fast (there are lots of repeated key-hits, right?). I remember around that time (maybe a little later) I had a slide-out keyboard Samsung of some sort. I got a reputation for writing long texts, haha.

[crmi]

Some of the young team haven't seen a rotary phone before.. Using t9 typing must seem like encryption to them.

[gaazoh]

Very cool, I implemented this once in python, it's a fun exercise, and knowledge that is gradually disappearing (modern phones with 12-key physical keyboards usually don't even have a T9 implementation, and when they do it doesn't perform well, even higher-tech KaiOS phones).

Although I appreciate the effort, I see a couple of issues with this implementation:

* The demo doesn't seem to work properly, the first thing I tried to type was "hello world", but it didn't recognize "hello" and I got "43556" instead.

* The word list is generated generated C code, which makes it hard to use other dictionaries (languages) or to add words during use (you can't add all place and people names to the list, but people are going to want to reference a handful of them many times). Loading from and appending to a plain text word list would make more sense, and maybe additionally use a custom binary format for the trie structure for fast loading into memory once a word list is imported on first use (hardware that would benefit from T9 might not be fast enough for conversion to be "instant")

* Non-latin script support would be nice. Although I have no knowledge whether Greek or Cyrillic languages used a T9 mechanism, it would be a minor change to define. Korean 12-key typing is also very cool, but I don't know whether that counts as T9.

[jesprenj]

I never saw anyone use T9 in Slovenia, but from being online and watching american movies I noticed it's used almost universally. I guess it works for typing English but Slovene didn't get such good support. Plus it was never enabled by default so people (myself included) just learned to get fast fingers.

[franga2000]

I remember disabling T9 as the first step when getting any "new" phone, so it must've been enabled on some. Then again, I rarely got phones new from the store, so this might have been because they were factory reset.

I don't think I ever really knew what it was, other than "that thing that made typing difficult". I doubt any phone shipped with a Slovene dictionary for T9, so it was probably just doing its best trying to map my seemingly nonsensical keypresses onto English words.

[fimdomeio]

The great thing about those keyboards was that a lot of people could just turn off text prediction and type text with a single hand without looking at the screen.

[jaffa2]

Huh?

The great thing about T9 (certainly on the Nokia 3210 and 8210) back in the day was you could type messages fast with few k/s without looking. As long as you had enough experience to know the word combos.

Ive never found a t9 system as good as the Nokia implementation. In some respects its better than qwerty for short messages. And don’t get me started on apples fundamentally broken auto correct system. People dont know any better these days. There’s actual adults walking today that have never typed on a real keyboard.

[strathmeyer]

T9wording is still the easiest way to text while working a stick shift.

[wkirby]

I dream of building an apple watch case that adds a T9 bluetooth keyboard. Turn the standalone Apple Watch into the dumbphone I've always wanted.

[jorvi]

This is exactly my dream too, especially after seeing the Apple Watch prototype dumbphone cases they used to conceal them in public[0]. It would be a glorious re-purposing of the Apple Watch to serve the most diehard fans of the killed iPhone Mini.

Sadly the Apple Watch doesn't do proper external text input. You can connect a bluetooth keyboard, but it works by sending all input via the VoiceOver accessibility feature, which is slow and fidgety.

[0]https://cdn.idropnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/1509254...

[jauntywundrkind]

How does the web demo work? I can enter numbers but where do we see resolved words? https://foxmoss.github.io/libt9/

[foxmoss]

Please submit an issue on the Github repo! This is a bug, it should automatically show with words as you type. Include platform details, console logs, etc. I am unable to test every platform alone sadly.

[bux93]

There's also a T9 keyboard for android on the f-droid store https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.sspanak.tt9/

[cortesoft]

I never learned how to type fast on those old phones because I couldn't afford to send text messages.