So yesterday, I was giving a lecture on Lin Yutang and his MingKwai typewriter and a student informed me that, apparently, it had been found.

Let me elaborate: The MingKwai was a revolutionary machine that could be used to type a theoretical maximum of 90 000 Chinese characters, almost twice as much as in Imperial China's largest dictionary. The legacy of its "Magic Eye" viewfinder system and Lin's statistical analysis can still be seen in how Chinese is written on computers today. According to Thomas S. Mullaney, it marked the birth of "input". Its only prototype was believed to have been lost, possibly thrown away or disassembled for parts.

And it was found. In a basement in New York. This January.

*high-pitched noises*

Original Facebook post that is either reporting the find or a very elaborate scam: https://www.facebook.com/groups/127768622643436/permalink/950194670400823/?rdid=WoJvYLekDUuGmSYh&share_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fshare%2Fp%2F19qjBZdYpj%2F

Blog post by Richard Polt with pictures: https://writingball.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-discovery-of-lin-yutangs-mingkwai.html

#MingKwai #LinYutang #typewriters #ChineseLanguage #languages #input #InputMethods

@waltertross @bytebro

It was a question of what Unexpected Keyboard's [sup] modifier key would actually produce in the final post. It is a quite poorly documented tool.

#InputMethods

@bytebro

There are also interesting options for people for whom a QWERTY keyboard on a tiny 'phone screen is incredibly fiddly, but — alas! — they lack a high digits first setting for their #NumericKeypad. There is also the question of how easy the world should be making posting when alcohol has impeded fine motor control. (-:

https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

#Android #InputMethods

@bytebro

Let me open up a whole new vista of possibilities for you.

https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

#Android #InputMethods #NumericKeypad

The "symbol" layout (for English) is just a strict subset of the "writer" layout, and the plain layout a strict subset of the "symbol"; so I have whittled down my layout list in order to add maths and Greek.

Greek might not be that useful:

έν άρχη έν ο λογοσ

τω Βαχχω

Not quite right for any Greek that I might type. PC still beats Android device, here.

#ThumbKey #InputMethods

My goodness! There is a mathematics layout in Thumb-Key.

∀x∈ℂ, x≠0: ∃y∈ℂ ∋ x⋅y=1

No nabla for div, grad, and curl, though.

#ThumbKey #InputMethods #mathematics #physics

I finally got around to installing ThumbKey, an alternative keyboard input method for Android.

I was braced for a mediocre clone of #MessageEase.

It is better than MessageEase.

I particularly like that with the "writer" layouts I can enter em-dashes and ellipses as a matter of course, and that the "compose" layouts allow easy input of accented characters. The return-swipe to get a one-off capital, overriding auto-caps, also helps with FediVerse CamelCase.

Goodbye, GBoard!

#InputMethods