I regard “smart” as an epithet I want to avoid in appliances. Light switches, thermostats, refrigerators, and all the rest seem to work great without adding internet connectivity, security breaches, corporate surveillance, and vendors removing functionality, or ending support to turn the appliance into e-waste.

I really hate video, prefer reading. But by reading the material to a camera, people get paid by youtube, and then set up a patreon for buying access to the material they read. Everybody loses, hooray:-(

For me, the key is FOSS. I was a keen fan of swiftkey, its word predictions worked great. Then it was bought by a company that I distrust, and when I was forced to choose another, I decided to try to ensure I’d never have to switch again.

A little while after I bailed on swiftkey, the news reports came that it was auto-filling random strangers’ credit card numbers; I felt vindicated.

I’ve got three soft keyboards enabled on my phone, to choose between as needed.

Unexpected Keyboard is my default; it’s a perfectly cromulent basic keyboard, that makes all the punctuation, ctrl/fn/esc available for comfy shell work.

When I need to type in non-ascii characters like accented letters, I have AnySoft available. And pwsafe has a soft keyboard in it to let me avoid passing my (exceedingly hard to type, long random) passwords through the clipboard.

I used to have Hacker’s Keyboard in the mix, but Unexpected Keyboard has made it unnecessary.

With “Unexpected Keyboard” (from f-droid) it’s ok. I’ve come to expect that there’s a basic choice between easy, with GUI, and powerful (like “sort a region of lines”), which is only GUI if you’ve got a powerful GUI, like plan 9. Otherwise, powerful means keyboard-driven.

When I’ve got a long, complex edit, I’ve got a nice, pocket-size, battery-powered folding bluetooth keyboard; combined with the kickstands on my phone cases, it is pretty good.

I use jove (a small, lightweight emacs) within Termux, and M-X filter-region through sort

I’d love one. Preferably the opens-like-a-book style, not the vertical ribbon.

But I don’t want to carry around something that costs that much. They’re currently priced for someone with way more money.

Derek Lowe has some explanation:

In The Pipeline

I’m in a similar situation. My Pixel3 is the only phone I have that can install a banking app, but my Nexus 6 still gets monthly security updates via LineageOS. Since Google wants me to repla e phones every few years, when one of these dies, I’m getting an A14 5G. On a cost per year of running everything including apps that block custom ROMs, Pixels are far too pricey. I think they envy Apple their pricing, but don’t do support.

And as long as I’ll have to get a phone, I want newer radios.