The 8pen
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters who used it remember it as an unusually fast and accurate touchscreen text input method and a fascinating alternative to QWERTY.
What it is
A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec horsawlarway · 2022-06 · on “The PocketReform is a made-in-Berlin Linux handheld”
> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as a freaky unusable layout, just because it would look unfamiliar, lol. Absolutely. 8-Pen was this for Android. (example video here: [this video] ) It was absolutely, hands down without question, the most accurate way to quickly enter text into a phone using only a screen. Seriously - I could type at about 25-35 wpm on my phone screen at 100% accuracy, one handed. They'd done a ton of work to place letters based on frequency and likely combinations to make typing smooth and relatively fast. No fucking disaster of auto-complete that I have t
Recommends Tijdreiziger · 2023-01 · on “The iPhone Keyboard – Make It or Break It (2022)”
The physical ones (on flip phones) were also 12-key (0-9, *, and #), so I suppose it was just swiping on the keys that was novel. It definitely does leave one to wonder whether that innovation was inspired by this prototype. Since we’re on the topic of input methods: I’ve always found the 8pen [1] fascinating. I sadly never had the opportunity to try it for myself, since I was using an iPhone rather than Android at the time (and it’s since been delisted). [1] [this video]
Cites grishka · 2025-04 · on “Show HN: iPhone 2005 weird "Blob Keyboard" simulator”
I honestly never understood why on earth QWERTY became the standard for touchscreen text input. It's a good keyboard layout but only when the keys are physical and large enough that you can type with two hands without looking at the thing. But it's absolutely godawful when you have to use it with one finger or two thumbs and no feel. All those dictionary-based crutches that were piled on top of it over time don't help, they only exacerbate the problem, especially considering how laughably poorly they work with languages whose grammar is more complex than English. I've been using touchscreen phones since 2011 yet I somehow still make typos all the time. This suggests that the problem isn't me