swipeGuess

swipeGuess is a completion program intended to be used as a plugin for touchscreen-keyboards on mobile devices.

For each line input from stdin, it looks through a wordlist and outputs the first possible match for that gesture.

it's run like input-program | swipeGuess wordlist.txt | output-program

swipeGuess also provides options for returning multiple results and ignoring certain characters. See the man page for more information.

input-program

The input program should output a stream of letters "swiped through", then a newline.

This is supported by wvkbd since version 0.6 and phosh-osk-stub since 0.28.0.

wordlist

This should be a list of words, sorted by preferability of choice.

Good starting points can be found on the web, based on your language.

Example English Word Lists

• http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/wordlist - 69,903 English words, including obscure words, missing common stems.
• http://www.mieliestronk.com/corncob_lowercase.txt - 58,110 English words with British spelling.
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dwyl/english-words/master/words.txt - 466,550 words, including many proper nouns like names.
• https://norvig.com/ngrams/count_1w.txt - 333,333 words, abbreviations, etc, sorted by popularity.
• https://www.keithv.com/software/wlist/index.php - page with several links providing intersections between english word lists (26,680 - 1,516,998 words)
• Your computer may have a list installed already in /usr/share/dict/, or one may be installable through your package manager.

sorting tips

The most basic sorting technique would put longest words first, otherwise, it may be impossible to type them.

# Good autocompletion for terminal
ls $PATH | awk '{ print length, $0 }' | sort -nr | cut -d" " -f2- > binsSorted.txt

Smarter sorting would be keyboard-layout aware. mapScore can do that for you

./mapScore map.tsv <words.txt | sort -nr | cut -f2 > wordsSorted.txt

map.tsv uses tabs and newlines to create the grid-based layout. See map.qwerty.noapos.tsv for a sample of how to format this file.

If your keys are in a hexagonal layout, use mapScore like ./mapScore map.simple.tsv bee.

(mapScore.py was the old version of this, and probably should be removed, being slower and with less features.).

output-program

• completelyTypeWord.sh (included in this repository) will type the characters (besides the first character, which is already typed by wvkbd) using wtype.

Installation/Usage with wvkbd

1. Be using a wayland-based graphical shell (such as sway), and have wtype installed.
2. Compile with your favorite C compiler: gcc swipeGuess.c -o swipeGuess.
3. copy swipeGuess and completelyTypeWord.sh into your $PATH (~/.local/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/ for example)
4. wvkbd-mobintl -O | swipeGuess /path/to/words.txt | completelyTypeWord.sh
   • In SXMO, KEYBOARD_ARGS='-O | swipeGuess /path/to/words.txt | completelyTypeWord.sh' can be added to your ~/.profile to enable this (effective on restart).

Usage with phosh-osk-stub

gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk osk-features "['key-drag']"
gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk.Completers.Pipe command 'swipeGuess /usr/share/swipeGuess/words/words-qwerty-en 5 | tr "\t" "\n"'
gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk.Completers default pipe
gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk completion-mode "['manual','hint']"

Multiple suggestions

phosh-osk-stub's pipe completer accepts multiple suggestions, newline separated. This can be scripted like

gsettings set sm.puri.phosh.osk.Completers.Pipe command 'sh -c "swipeGuess /usr/share/swipeGuess/words/words-qwerty-en 5 | tr \"\t\" \"\n\""'

Extended information

SwipeBehaviors is a project that uses swipeGuess and provides more advanced functionality, like presenting several choices that can be picked with suggpicker.

Contributing

swipeGuess is maintained by Zach DeCook, who may or may not be reached directly for related inquiries.

Patches and long-form discussions for this project are also accepted on my swipeKeyboard mailing list on sourcehut: (email/archive).

e.g.

git config sendemail.to '~earboxer/swipeKeyboard@lists.sr.ht'
git config format.subjectPrefix 'PATCH swipeGuess'
git send-email HEAD~1

(See man git-send-email or https://git-send-email.io for more information)