I wonder what it would be like to design a phone keyboard specifically to be used with vim

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@DocBohn @mcc I'm surprised no one has done a keyboard with configurable keys yet.

[bob@feed.hella.cheap]

@mcc https://github.com/PSP-Archive/DanzeffOSLib if you use both thumbs and the shoulder buttons you can input any key with no more than two actions and without having to hunt for anything. seems like a natural fit for mode-based editing

[futuristicrobert@infosec.exchange]

@urig @mcc

that's a special implant for using EMACS.

[snoopj@hachyderm.io]

@rk @mcc this is still my biggest bugbear when I want to use vim from mobile, the muscle memory for ESC is hard to break, but one or another thing in my mobile stack treats ESC on my (hardware) keyboard as "home button", rendering vim pretty useless.

I have some mapping in my .vimrc for "I need ESC to mode-shift but I can't actually use it" but I could not tell you what it is.

I agree with what was expressed elsewhere in the thread that "keyboard" may be a limiting abstraction for a mobile device. It could be interesting to mode-shift with gestures, for instance. (OTOH, keyboards are still Pretty Goddamned Good, so)

[rk@mastodon.well.com]

@SnoopJ @mcc

So you’re telling me we need a phone with a single physical escape key.

[raphaelp@types.pl]

@mcc i have wondered that too

[aburka@hachyderm.io]

@mcc @joshg huh, are there any phone keyboards that actually do combos? with multitouch you could but I can't recall seeing it

[ymndoseijin@pl.comofas.org]

@mcc I used to run this thing a couple of years ago https://f-droid.org/packages/inc.flide.vi8 and although I don't really think it's much related to vim at all it's pretty cool looking

[orb2069@mastodon.online]

@mcc Android 15 has this when you double tap the shift key?

[joshg@mathstodon.xyz]

@aburka
map ctrl, alt to volume buttons, let's go
@mcc

[eigen@mattstodon.panar.ooo]

@mcc would the modal editing functionality of vim be particularly effective/efficient on a phone keyboard? (the idea of trying to use Emacs on a phone keyboad [no matter how many modifiers it provides] fills me with horror 😛)

[spindleyq@gamemaking.social]

@mcc I often think about what it would be like to design a phone keyboard that could actually be used for text editing in general

[ed1conf@bsd.network]

@joshg @mcc

Still not much easier to press escape, meta, alt, or control.

On the other hand, ed(1) works quite cromulently on a phone with a default on-screen keyboard.

[tambourineman@mastodon.cloud]

@mcc
inoremap jj <Esc>

Helps. Typing the column character is indeed annoying on mobile