Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Doing this wrong may mess up your swype keyboard, seriously messing it up may even break the regular keyboard and leave you with a phone that is unusable without a reflash.

At the time of writing this has seen very little testing and there may be issues that haven't yet been found. If you don't feel confident you'll be able to reflash your phone if you need to, don't do this yet.

You need developer mode for this method. It may be doable with file browsers and text editors but I haven't tried that (please post instructions if you do and make it work)

0: Back up everything, copy the backup off the phone (to a computer or similar)
1: Open xterm
2: devel-su
3: provide the password (rootme)
4: cd /usr/share/swype/data
5: cp languages.lst languages.lst.bak
6: edit languages.lst in your favorite editor (real men use vi) to remove unwanted/unused languages. Don't use Nano. Nano does unmentionable things* to unmentionable objects**, and will make swype have an error.
7: enjoy



*: Changes encoding and/or adds byte order marker and/or adds helpful line breaks. Or something like that.
**: Files

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

Wrong thread...

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

I'm getting a Swype Database error when I try to choose the last language in my list (German,EnglishUS). Does anyone have an idea what I did wrong?

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

you're probably getting wrong one thing: this doesn't work so well, it is quick and dirty hack that probably doesn't work if you delete stuff between some languages...

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

I dont really see the point of deleting the unused languages anyway. Id rather remove the languages button.

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

The original languages.lst doesn't have a comma after the last character. Dis you leave the one that was behind your last language?

I also made sure to use the regular keyboard while making the changes. I don't know how this will behave if you change the file while using swype.

Yep. Quick and dirty. But working without problems for me so far. I'll edit the original post to add appropriate warnings. If anyone is having problems after doing this I recommend putting back the copy of languages.lst, if it still fails after that: attempt to reinstall swype packages, or reflash.

Some of us use more than one language. If you use only one I can see why you'd prefer to get rid of the button, but I have no idea how to do that. (Except the first step: back up everything. Because if you manage to break the regular keyboard in the process you'll pretty much have to reflash)

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

I tried both with and without trailing comma, also looked for whitespace or line breaks, all makes no difference.

Tried again with Swype disabled in System preferences during the change, same outcome.

It's a pity, changing between 2 languages with a short press of the button would be extremely handy (also I'm used to being able to pick my languages from Swype on Android).

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

Does it work properly if you restore the file as before?

When exactly do you get the error message?

What is your version of swype? ("dpkg -s swype-keyboard")

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the langueges you use
 

After restoring the backup file, it works fine again.

The error pops up when I choose the last language in the list, no matter whether I'm cycling through languages with short presses on the language button or picking it from the language list after a long press.

When I append a third language to the list, the second one works, but the third one throws the error.

Swype version is 1.19.33902+0m6

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Please use the public bugtracke if you think there's a bug in the language configuration of Swype: https://harmattan-bugs.nokia.com/

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Same exact version as me., so that's not the cause of us seeing different behaviour.

I've checked and there is no line break, or space, after the list, both in the original and my modified version.

I used "vi" to edit. Did you use this or some other editor that may have "helped" by adding a line break for you?

Could you have added words to the dictionary of one of the languages that is now disabled? What happens if you restore the original and then remove just one language? If it works try removing one language at a time until you find which one makes things fail.

I see from your earlier post that your second language is US-english. I've been using norwegian and UK english. Maybe US has some kind of dependency to UK, what happens if you keep both?

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

According to swype.com, selecting languages is a feature in swype 3.26, currently in beta. So I guess it's a missing feature, and if the version we get is updated one this is out of beta then this hack won't be nessessary. Not a bug per se.

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

I tried all combinations of line break and space (and lack thereof) - I used nano, because I can't find vi in the repositories (which surprised me).

There's only words added in German and English US - as that one works once it's not last in the list it must be something else. Dependency: Unlikely - when I had German, US English and UK English, US all of a sudden worked but UK showed the error because it was last in list.

I guess I'll have to live with the long press and list selection to change language for now, will try again with PR1.2 (and maybe throw in a factory reset while I'm at it).

Thanks for all your help :-)

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Thanks, this is exactly what I've been missing as I constantly have to switch between two languages.

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Good news. I have now reproduced the problem: By copying the original language file into place, and then editing with nano I get the error. If you edit with vi you should be good.

vi has to be part of either developer mode, or the Utilities package you can install after activating developer mode. (Otherwise it's a mystery where I got it from, bacause I haven't installed anything else that could account for it)

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

I can confirm, nano is quilty, or atleast after editing with vi, no database errors occur anymore....

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

That sounds very strange!
Why should nano break something?
I use it all the time on my PC, N900 and also N9 to edit config files and never had any issue.

OT:
Is there a way to remove entries from the dictionary I occidentally added?

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Vaskinn, you're right on both - I have a working 2 languages setup now - and even better, I have my beloved vi (actually I had it all along, but hadn't seen it listed in the utilities package). Thanks so much :-)

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

I can think of a few ways.

Maybe nano saves in a different format ("plain" text files are nowhere near as plain as you'd think) and swype is being picky because we're not really supposed to edit that file. (I'd have to examine the files in a hex editor to see)

Or perhaps instead of saving over the contents of the existing file nano does a "delete-create" when saving, losing a file system attribute or something similar in the process.

(my money is on encoding, linefeeds or byte order mark)

Edit:
And the winner is linefeed. Added by nano without asking.

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

Do you mean the line feed at the end of the line?
Most linux programs actually give out a warning if the config file misses an empty line at its end. i.e. fstab (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-fstab-241806/)
Because of that I am very used to end a config file with an ending line.
Now, we could argue if it is right from nano to add one without asking, but it seems to be usual (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/he.../msg00009.html).
I wouldnt see it really as a bug in nano but more as a Swype being too picky!

/OT

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

It's an expectation thing.

On linux I would expect the system to do what it's told, no questions asked. That includes saving without a linefeed at the end, even if that will often cause problems for the program reading the file. It's not the responsibility of the editor to guess what my intention is because that can lead to problems, just like this time.

Re: Howto: Limit swype to the languages you use
 

FYI for people not very familiar with Vi editor:

Line endings are mentioned before but I'd like to emphasize that even when you use Vi you still have to be careful not to touch line ending / line feed.
It is safest to delete the words by using 'dw' (=delete word) and 'x' (=delete character).

Removing that last character in last word is cumbersome in 'insert' mode and you may get temptation to add line change in frustration, as I did, and even after removing the new line the database was still corrupt according to swype settings.