Keyboard redesign

[Bilgus]

I'm starting to implement some of:
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/VKeyboardDesignProposal

This isn't going to end up exactly like the document has laid out instead we will ship with the standard characters we always have
users will be able to load custom keyboards with the character sets they want (just as they always have been able)

https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/4460

this is still a wip and only working in the sim so far

comments welcome

[bahus]

Just another idea for keyboard. I quite liked "arrow keys friendly" keyboard on my old e-ink book. Attaching image describing how it works.

[Bilgus]

bahaus that is pretty close to how I was imagining it originally
pods of characters grouped by relevance

problems I envision is that grouping would change with different languages
and not make much sense with a foreign char set
that & lack of screen real estate

[bahus]

pods of characters grouped by relevance
problems I envision is that grouping would change with different languages

This 5 sections split allows to select any English/Russian letter in max 4 key presses.
Standard PC keyboard layout has been used by default. As you can see on example picture I provided it's qwerty layout divided in 5 sections. But they also provided ability to customize layouts with user provided characters (just in case example of custom user keyboard layouts can be found here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=71946)

[Bilgus]

I get the idea but that will then require you to back out of a section to choose the next so idk that its that much more efficient
unless you work on the letter grouping qwerty kinda stinks in that regard

basically the first thing is getting a way to parse the menu structure without breaking everything else

I think I have that worked out for the most part with the latest

next comes adding viewports and scrolling amongst other things to the actual selector

then we can try out a few layouts with a lot less code changes

[bahus]

that will then require you to back out of a section to choose the next

No. Pressing OK in section selects char and quits to section select mode.

[amachronic]

Grouping keys seems interesting. Instead of hardcoding the groupings they could be parsed out of a text file if blank lines are treated as horizontal dividers and blank columns as vertical dividers.

Code: [Select]

_@$%:;!?"()
`1234567890

qwe rty uio
asd fgh jkl
zxc vbn mp'
Anything more complex than this eg. switchable layouts would probably require a more elaborate file format.

One other thing that's really important in my opinion is putting the keyboard below the text, since touchscreen typing is basically unusable when the keyboard is on top.