After having installing sliderotate I began a fourth or fifth honeymoon with my n810 (preceding honeymoons include discovering auto-lock, discovering the power of SSH w/ a dedicated linux box, and moving everything to the internal SD card), and I started using portrait mode whenever possible. After accidentally launching the finger keyboard a few times, I considered changing a majority of my passwords to ones only containing keys on the left side of the keyboard, so that I wouldn't have to switch out of the coveted one handed usage quite so often, and just today I remembered the mostly useless (for n810 users) stylus keyboard, which, turns out, is *almost* passable for a one-handed keyboard in portrait mode.

The stylus keyboard was obviously made for landscape usage, as made evident by its conservation of vertical space, but I think with a little rearranging of the buttons (I'm looking at you, numberpad) and larger keys, it could make for an enjoyable typing experience

For those unfamiliar with what the keyboard looks like in portrait mode:



and here is a hastily made (and on second thought, fairly un-ergonomic) concept keyboard I cooked up

I threw all of the buttons on the right because it seemed to me like the keyboard was comprised of 3 panels and I'm not sure to what extent the keyboard could be edited, so I just did away with the left panel (and the fairly useless language key -- language can be accessed from settings option in the bottom-left menu button). Also, I left the bottom row alone, because the spacebar is where auto-complete text shows up, added a zero key, removed the exclamation and question mark, moved the hide icon (drew a new one because the spacebar overlaps it in portrait). The three primary rows were scaled to a button height of 65 pixels, and I did too much alterations to the dimensions of the number row to keep track of (but hey, it looks good, besides my copied and stretched 'o' and '@' keys).

So now that I'm done with my dreaming, could it be done? A couple points in the right direction would be nice, especially since there doesn't appear to be any threads tackling the idea of altering the onscreen keyboards -- or perhaps the opportunity to rub this feature in those smelly n900 owners' faces is enticing enough for someone far more experienced than I to take a stab at it.

EDIT: ok, found this: http://maemo.org/development/documen...owto_him_bora/
which describes how to change the tiny keyboard (which is apparently just a GTK widget), but not alter the input method panel itself

look into ukeyboard and its accompanying creator.

here is how to edit layouts using it:
http://repo.or.cz/w/ukeyboard.git/bl.../doc/howto.txt

I've looked into ukeyboard several times, and it seems I'm technically challenged.

And by the way, the N900 lost all trace of the stylus keyboard, so you can't see outside the vkeyboard while typing. I'd definitely say there's already enough to wipe in their/our faces in the vkeyboard department.

Not quite sure why I posted this...