Typing with my nose

I’ve been doing a lot of command entry;on my phone lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever designed these little smartphone keyboards must have fingers the size of toothpicks.

I’m trying to type commads, not win a game of Operation.

So I came up with FatF8nger, an Android keyboard with slightly bigger buttons, a proper PC-style layout, and some features that actually make sense when you’re writing code on a phone.

It’s inspired by the old Hacker’s Keyboard. There’s a permanent number row, arrow keys, Tab, Esc, Ctrl, Alt, and the other things programmers need without digging through three screens of smiley faces.

But my favorite feature is something I call Clipboard Purgatory. Instead of copying something, switching apps, copying something else, and losing the first thing, FatF8nger gives me eight paste positions to work with. I can keep snippets of code, commands, addresses, or whatever else I’m juggling without constantly going back to retrieve them.

Then there’s my typing. Apparently, my fingers think the number 8 is the letter I, 3 is E, and 6 is Y. FatF8nger knows about a handful of these mistakes and quietly fixes them when appropriate. It’s not trying to rewrite my sentences or predict what I’m thinking. And it had better leave my IP addresses, passwords, and code alone.

No AI, no cloud processing, no keyboard sending everything I type off to somebody’s server. Just a native Kotlin keyboard doing its job locally.

I don’t need a keyboard that writes poetry, generates emojis, or finishes my thoughts.

I need one that lets me type sudo systemctl restart apache2 without having to correct it six times.

FatF8nger isn’t trying to correct my spelling. It’s correcting my fingers.

And yes, I deliberately put an 8 in the name. Seemed appropriate.