This has been on my bucket list for a while: I’d love to have a non-keyboard form of text entry that I can use on the go without a table or stable place to put things down. I just grab a bluetooth game controller for a few bucks, get something to hold the phone on it, and write from anywhere.

If it has a complex entry system that takes time to learn and would make me feel like Neo, even better.

People do sell these weird contraptions (https://www.mytwiddler.com/ and https://shop.tapwithus.com/) that you can hold in one hand to type with, but engineering and manufacturing them at such small scales is pretty damn expensive; over $200 last I looked into it. And I definitely don´t want to learn an input method that is determined entirely by a private company that could become enshittified or go out of business.

Bluetooth game controllers come in a variety of price points and have a stable form factor, so it’s definitely a good option here.

Joytokey could be used as a base, but I think it is mostly made for quick gaming shortcuts and would´t be really efficient for exclusive text entry (?). Joytochord, which turns the controller into a chording keyboard, seems to be defunct.

FOSS to the rescue?

I’ve dabbled with multiple instruments in my life

It seems crazy to me someone would learn all the fundamentals of music and not at least be able to play rudimentarily another instrument. I mean, why not? You already understand music, you just have to figure out the instrument, which is a pretty small investment relative to musicianship, and opens up a lot more possibilities.

What have you learned from your different instruments?