Back in June I decided that we should put an SSD in Chris’ laptop (a.k.a. my old laptop). I ended up buying a new solid state for myself and moving my Intel X25-M into her laptop.

Shopping for an SSD this time was a very different experience. When I bought my first SSD there was really only one drive worth buying; I just had to wait until I saw the best possible price on that drive. These days the majority of solid-state drives are fast and well made. I just had to find a reasonably priced drive of the size I want and Google a bit just to make sure that it isn’t a lemon.

Show:

Version 1.03c                             ------Sequential Output------- --Sequential Input-  --Random-
                                          -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite-- -Per Chr- --Block--  --Seeks--
Machine                              Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
Xen Server (4x400 RAID 10)             1G 68909  97 128789 45  48402  18 55770  91 106948  24   326   0
Intel X25-M 80 GB                      8G 56415  89  87157 11  39827   9 69707  98 298590  29 16150  45
Crucial M4 128 GB                     16G   954  98 183205 20 105877   9  4858  99 327088  16  4306 120
Crucial M4 128 GB aes-256, nodiscard  16G   604  94 152764 16  63475   6  4064  98 145506   6  2380  46
Crucial M4 128 GB aes-256, pre-trim   16G   794  97  56071  6  58384   7  3861  98 121742   8 10462 167
Crucial M4 128 GB aes-256, discard    16G   724  94  28447  2  22498   2  3948  96 134872   5  2361  45
Crucial M500 480 GB aes-256           63G   483  99 406072 55 150005  34  1362  99 309761  38 +++++ +++

The Crucial M4 128 GB

I ended up settling on the Crucial M4 128 GB solid state drive. It really isn’t much of an upgrade over the Intel X25-M. It is measurably faster, but I can’t notice the difference. The leap from a traditional hard drive with glacial seek times to a solid-state drive was very noticeable. The X25 is already so fast that the incremental upgrade isn’t easy to feel.

The extra 48 GB of space is very, very noticeable. My gargantuan laptop has room for two hard drives. I was using symlinks to move some larger directories out of my SSD and onto the extra disk, mostly things like my downloads directory, virtual machine images, and larger games like Team Fortress 2.

The Intel X25 usually ran about half full because of this. Today, with all that cruft moved back to the SSD, the Crucial M4 tends to hover right around 75% full.

What the benchmarks say

First I would like to note that something has changed somewhere between my documented X25-M benchmark and today. I don’t currently know why the “per character” speeds on these benchmarks are so low. I do know that I’ve gotten similar results this year from the X25-M, but I didn’t save any of those results.

The Intel X25-M and the Crucial M4 have very comparable read performance on my SATA 2 controller. When I benchmarked the X25-M a few years ago I thought for sure it was maxing out the SATA 2 port. The Crucial M4 proved me wrong, though. It is able to eke out an extra 10%.

The Crucial M4 definitely performs writes faster than the Intel X25-M. It is too bad Bonnie doesn’t measure the small random writes that most early solid-state drives were so terrible at.

Why do I use Bonnie for benchmarks?

I’ve been using Bonnie forever. I remember some scores from almost a decade ago and I bet I could even dig some up out of old backups. I remember watching the folks from 3Ware running Bonnie benchmarks at Linux Expo back in 2001. I’m mostly still running and comparing Bonnie benchmarks for historical reasons.

The Crucial M4’s horrendous TRIM speed

At some point in the last five months I’ve encrypted my entire laptop. This is only partially relevant here because it turns out that I forgot to enable TRIM “pass through” on my encryption layer. I noticed this when my first benchmark for this article came out way slower than I thought it would. I did run a benchmark right after I encrypted the drive, but I either misplaced it or didn’t save it.

The first thing I did when I noticed this was to enable TRIM/discard everywhere I could, manually run fstrim, reboot, and ran another benchmark. That is when I got the horrible, horrible 20 to 30 MB/sec write speeds. It was so awful that I couldn’t even use the laptop while the benchmark was running.

After disabling the discard option, the write speeds improved by 300% and 500%. A freshly trimmed drive with discard turned off runs about as fast as I would hope, right around the maximum speed my CPU can perform AES-256. My laptop was still responsive during the benchmark.

I will definitely be leaving discard turned off on this drive. I’ll just have to manually run fstrim every once in a while. TRIM on the X25-M did not incur this much of a performance penalty.

Was it worth the trouble and cost of upgrading from the Intel X25-M?

No. It was not. The X25-M is still an excellent drive. My real goal here was to remove the spinning drive from another computer. If I weren’t doing that, this wouldn’t have been worth the time, effort, or money.

I firmly believe that the biggest day-to-day advantage of an SSD in a desktop computer is the vastly improved seek times. That order of magnitude leap from a 7200 RPM hard drive to an SSD is the difference you’ll be likely to notice. The other performance improvements are nice, but you’ll never notice them without a stopwatch.

If you’re still using an old-school spinning platter hard drive I think the Crucial M4 is a great value. It is quite speedy and well under a dollar per gigabyte.

I recently saw a tweet from Rob Fearon that pointed me towards all of Sokurah’s awesome games over at tardis.dk. I’ve had fun playing Rob’s wonderfully colorful games, most of which have been on my arcade cabinet for a long time. That was a good enough reason for me to check out Sokurah’s games, and boy am I glad I did!

The list of games he’s made is quite large, and so far I’ve only gotten through most of the ones that use vector graphics. I sure do like vector graphics!

Every game from tardis.dk that I tried ran perfectly under Wine. I won’t be at all surprised if the ones I haven’t gotten to yet run just as well.

Most, if not all, of these games are remakes of classic games. They’re remakes of games from computers I never had the chance to see, so I don’t recognize many of them.

Arcadia

This is the one I’ve played the most. It looks easy, but I’ve been playing rather poorly. I died quite a few times before ever finishing the second level. I was very excited to see level three, though, and once I got there I seemed to be on level 5 before I knew it. I must be improving.

Arcadia very much reminds me of playing Parsec on my TI 99/4a when I was a kid. Parsec definitely didn’t use vector graphics, but your ship and some of the enemy ships were wire frames. In Arcadia the enemies attack vertically, in Parsec they attack horizontally. So maybe they’re pretty different. I don’t care, though; it still triggered a memory…

Omega Race 2009

I have no idea what the original Omega Race was like. This game looks like Asteroids with a big rectangular obstacle blocking the center of the screen. It definitely fits in nicely on the arcade cabinet.

Star Castle

This is the only one I recognized, and it is quite an awesome remake of the original. It looks great and plays exactly how you’d expect it to. I’m not sure what else I can say about this one, it is remade so well that anything I would say about this I would probably say about the original!

Zektor

This one is interesting. The first thing that popped into my mind when playing Zektor was “Asteroids as a scrolling shoot ‘em up.” The enemies come at your from the top and, mostly, move towards the bottom. You control a ship that steers and shoots just like in asteroids. Every few levels there is a boss inside a Star Castle-like fortress.

Mapping the Controls

Sokurah did an awesome job here. All the controls were simple enough to map to the arcade buttons. I was able to use a single mapping for all of his games. He even made it extremely easy to exit the games. When you hit escape it asks you to confirm that you would like to quit. He has yes and no mapped to left and right, which is incredibly convenient!

It has been a while…

Steam tells me I haven’t played Team Fortress 2 since March 7th, so my abilities and my memories here may be a little rusty. The Steam Linux Beta seemed like a good excuse to play again, though!

Performance under Wine, eight months ago

The relevant specification of my laptop:

• Nvidia GT 230M
• Intel Core i7 2640QM (1.6ghz, 2.4ghz max turbo)

In March, under Wine, I had to run the game at 1280x720 to consistently get more than 30-40 frames per second or more. I remember a specific instance where the frames per second would drop under 20. On the “Upward” map, when waiting to spawn it sometimes shows you a view of pretty much the entire map. That view would drop to under 20 frames per second.

Native performance, today

With the native Linux Team Fortress 2 client I am able to play at 1920x1080 without any problems. I’m mostly seeing better frame rates than I had in March under Wine. I did check out that wide-angle view on the “Upward” map and I’m seeing 25 frames per second there now.

What else changed besides Wine vs Native?

This is exactly the same laptop I was using back in March. I’m running the 304.51 revision of the NVidia driver now; back in March I was likely running 290.x or 295.x.

Valve got multihead right!

I am running with a pair of 1080p LCD panels connected to my laptop. I expected it to do something stupid when I fired up Team Fortress 2. I was pleasantly surprised when it actually did the sanest thing possible.

It opened up a full-screen, borderless window on one of my displays. I had no trouble using my usual window manager hot keys to move the window over to the other monitor. I was completely free to click around the Team Fortress 2 menus or my other open windows. The game didn’t grab the cursor until I was actually actually playing. If I wanted to do something outside the game, all I had to do was hit escape to bring up the in-game menu.

This is exactly how full screen games should work.

Update: A recent update made full-screen support a bit less ideal. Now, when you click away to another window, you “full-screen” Team Fortress 2 is automatically minimized! I fixed this by adding export SDL_VIDEO_MINIMIZE_ON_FOCUS_LOSS=0 to my .zshenv file. Now I can comfortably poke around in my web browser in between rounds again!

I might have to put our Team Fortress 2 server back up!

Update: Use the 310.14 driver

I upgraded to the 310.14 driver last night. I installed it the lazy way (apt-get install nvidia-experimental-310). I’m now getting just shy of 70s frame per second on that wide-angle death view on “Upward” instead of 25!

Update: I started using the dx9frames configuration again. I seem to be too used to the lower quality graphics settings. With the default settings, I had kept mistakenly thinking that BLU team players that were on fire were actually on the RED team. I probably could have gotten used to this, but now my frame rates aren’t dipping down as low.

If you use the dx9frames configuration, I highly recommend that you flip the value of glow_outline_effect_enable from “0” to “1.” If you don’t, you’ll have an awful time using “The Scottish Resistance,” and you’ll never know where the cart is.

It has been about two weeks since I hung the new television on the wall behind the arcade table. Most of what I’ve done since then is set up some scripts to automate the resolution and screen orientation settings, and also tweaking all the emulators and native games to use the correct resolutions and orientations.

I’ve run into some problems, but I’ve also found some solutions. One of the solutions is causing new problems. The upgrade has been fun, and I have some new ideas to implement later on.

Early impressions of the “hybrid” arcade cabinet

I really like it. It reminds me of playing while sitting on one of those big, red stools in a real arcade back when I was a bit too small to see the screen well from the ground.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time tweaking native game settings. I assumed that I’d get every game set up in just an hour or two. It didn’t work out that way because it is impossible not to play some of these games once you fire them up. I probably spent at least two hours replaying Cave Story Plus.

It does feel like I am cheating a bit. It feels less authentic, but I think I can live with that.

nvidia-settings, disper, and xrandr

At first I was using disper to control the resolution and which of the two displays were active. However, disper and nvidia-settings are unable to control the rotation of a single display, and I need to be able to run the “internal” monitor inverted. Preferably I should be able to rotate it on the fly, since the rotation results in a HUGE (4+ times) slowdown, and some games just won’t run fast enough that way.

I started out running Nvidia’s 295.49 drivers that ship with Ubuntu 12.04. I upgraded them to the 304.51 version because they are supposed to have proper support for xrandr 1.3.

They very nearly do. I can independently control the resolution and rotation of each display with xrandr. It won’t let me use xrandr to add modelines to either display. This is problematic because the internal monitor has a 1360x768 modeline and the external television has a 1280x720. There are a handful of resolutions they don’t share.

I can still set any resolution I can think of using disper. So now I’m using a disper to activate displays and set their resolution and I’m using xrandr to set the orientation of the internal display.

Another small difference between 295.49 and 304.51

The 295.49 driver was quirky with regard to the television. It would only drive it at 1920x1080 or 1280x720. Everything else would be scaled up. This made it easy to get aspect-correct scaling for modes like 640x480 and 800x600.

The 304.51 “fixed” this problem for me. It will happily drive the television at 640x480 or 800x600. I should be excited about this, but suddenly many of the games that I set up are now scaled incorrectly.

I’ll have to work on this one a bit more.

I’m all out of buttons

I’d like to be able to have some manual control over the video settings. I am planning on setting up a web interface to change some settings on the fly. That way, anyone here can tweak things from their tablet or phone.

I have a handful of possible uses for the web interface:

• Change active video outputs and rotation (while games are running)
• Adjust volume, toggle ambient arcade sound track
• Kill the currently running game if it gets stuck
• Power down the cabinet

I’ve been slowly and incrementally working on cleaning up my shell config. I’ve been procrastinating over my persist and forget system for quite a while now. I have it up and working here just fine, but I built it and its extra git repository in place. I need to automate the installation and configuration process and I would also like to make sure it isn’t likely to eat anyone’s file before I release it.

In the mean-time, though, I have been digging through my configuration and I’ve found a few gems that I would like to list here. I use these under zsh but I am pretty sure they will work fine under bash as well.

Quickly share files on the public Internet with Python and SSH

I see ‘python -m SimpleHTTPServer’ one liner all the time. By itself this one is pretty useless for me. I almost never need to share something with anyone on my local network. I use this function instead:

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webshare () {
  local SSHHOST=patshead.com
  local SSHPORT=9999

  python -m SimpleHTTPServer &
  local PID=$!

  echo http://$SSHHOST:$SSHPORT | xclip
  echo Press enter to stop sharing, http://$SSHHOST:$SSHPORT copied to primary selection
  /usr/bin/ssh -R $SSHPORT:127.0.0.1:8000 $SSHHOST 'read'
  kill $PID
}

This does require you to have a server out on the Internet that you can ssh into. For my purposes, this fills a gap somewhere between a pastebin and something like Dropbox. I use it when I have a handful of files I want someone to take a look at.

A smarter tail command

I lifted this one from commandlinefu.com:

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tail() {
  local thbin="/usr/bin/tail"
  local fc lpf thbin

  if [ "${1:0:1}" != "-" ]; then
    fc=$(($#==0?1:$#))
    lpf="$((($LINES - 3 - 2 * $fc) / $fc))"
    lpf="$(($lpf<1?2:$lpf))"

    [ $fc -eq 1 ] && $thbin -n $lpf "$@" | /usr/bin/fold -w $COLUMNS | $thbin -n
  else
    $thbin "$@"
  fi
}

I really like this one. This tail wrapper checks the size of the terminal window and makes sure it shows you just a bit less than a screen full of output. It even takes long lines into account.

Automatically managing a “scratch” directory

This function was heavily inspired by an entry on Marcin Kulik’s blog:

`` bash My function to create a new scratch directory function ns { local cur_dir="$HOME/tmp/scratch/current" local new_dir="$HOME/tmp/scratch/date +‘%s’`”

mv $cur_dir $new_dir mkdir $cur_dir cd ~/scratch echo “New scratch dir ready” }

I’m always creating new scratch directories to work in, so I really liked his idea of creating a function to help manage the process.

I didn’t change his implementation too much. The only real difference is that my symlink never changes. I’m just moving the old, real scratch directory out of the way and putting a new one back in its place.

Most people are probably aware that calling the cd command without any arguments will take you back to your home directory. If you’re anything like me, you probably do this dozens of times each day.

I also end up working in git repositories quite a bit, and when I am working in a git repository I regularly find myself wanting to return to the root of the repository. Most of the time I am not buried too deep and it just takes one or two cd .. commands to climb up to where I want to be.

This seemed a bit silly to me. I’d rather not have to count how many levels deep I am. I decided that it would be a good idea to overload the cd command. Now, if I am in deep inside a git repository and call cd with no arguments, it will pop me straight up to the root. If I am at the root of a git repository or not in a repository at all, it will take the usual action and return me to my home directory.

Here is the code:

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_git_cd() {
  if [[ "$1" != "" ]]; then
    cd "$@"
  else
    local OUTPUT
    OUTPUT="$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null)"
    if [[ -e "$OUTPUT" ]]; then
      if [[ "$OUTPUT" != "$(pwd)" ]]; then
        cd "$OUTPUT"
      else
        cd
      fi
    else
      cd 
    fi
  fi
}

alias cd=_git_cd

Update 2012-11-13: I found more code!

I found another small, helpful shell function that I’ve been using to augment the cd command. I have no idea where this little function came from. It has probably been in my config for quite a long time.

If cd is given an existing file as the argument, this function will change to the directory containing that file. If not, it will just do what cd would normally do. I’m ever so slightly surprised that this function plays nicely with _git_cd!

Here is (very simple) the “cd-to-file” function:

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cd () {
  if [[ -f "$1" ]]; then
    builtin cd $(dirname "$1")
  elif [[ "$1" == "" ]]; then
    builtin cd
  else
    builtin cd "$1"
  fi
}

Both the cd function and _git_cd function work using zsh or bash.

I haven’t played this one much yet. I found this game in the Indie Royale Harvest Bundle, but my Google-fu couldn’t turn up any information on whether or not I’d be able to get it running on Linux using Wine, so I ended up trying it out for myself.

Getting it running under Wine

So far the game is running flawlessly under Wine. It took a bit of trial and error to get it up and running, though. I ended up trying quite a few different versions of Wine before it would work correctly. It ended up working when I tried version 1.5.9. When using versions 1.4.1, 1.5.3, and 1.5.16, it either failed to start or it just showed a black screen.

Knowing that part makes it easy. You just need to use winetricks to install d3dx9 and d3dcompiler_43. I ended up doing all that using Play On Linux. I also threw together my first POL installation script, MutantMudds.pol.

I’m sure it isn’t the most elegant script, but it is easy to use and it works. The steps should go something like this:

• click on Tools -> Run a local script in the Play On Linux window
• choose my MutantMudds.pol file
• click install/ok/next/etc on any DirectX installer windows
• choose MutantMudds_installer.exe when it asks for the installer
• click through the Mutant Mudds installer

The controls

Mapping the game controls to the arcade control panel was easy. Mutant Mudds uses the arrow keys to move around, X to jump, Z to shoot, and escape to quit. It is one of those wonderful, arcade-friendly games that don’t require the mouse at all.

Early impressions

When I first saw the (very short) video on the Indie Royale site it made me think of Cave Story. After sitting at the controls for a couple of minutes and getting a better look at the graphics, I’m getting more of a Commander Keen vibe. That’s a very good thing. I have fond memories of playing most of the Commander Keen series.

Update: I just tested Mutant Mudds with Wine version 1.6 and it runs just fine. With any luck it will continue to run on later releases as well.

Mutant Mudds is definitely going to be an excellent addition to the arcade cabinet.

Overall, I like my aging T-Mobile Vibrant, but it has been a bit of a mixed bag. When it debuted, the spec sheet made it look like one of the best devices available. It was thin. It was light. It had a big, bright AMOLED screen. It also had as much or more RAM, CPU, and GPU as any other phone available.

The software it shipped with was ridiculously bad. Samsung’s oddball RFS file system was really, really bad. Software updates were slow and rare. I don’t think T-Mobile got an official Ice Cream Sandwich release…

Support from my favorite aftermarket firmware, Cyanogenmod, was slow and very spotty. The phone also has an absolutely worthless GPS chipset.

I don’t want to imply that the phone was terrible. Team Whiskey gave us pretty good Android 2.1 and 2.2-based firmwares, even if the GPS never worked with them.

Slim Bean Jelly Bean ROM

Fast-forward to today, and things are looking pretty good. I’ve been running the Slim Bean firmware on my phone since version 2.0 and I’m pretty happy with how the Vibrant is running now.

I should qualify that statement a bit. Last year when I bought a (rather awful) 10” Viewsonic G-Tablet, I started relying on my phone just a bit less. Now that I’ve upgraded to a Nexus 7 tablet I’d be surprised if I use my phone more than an hour during any given week. My phone experience can be pretty bad these days and still be more than acceptable.

That said, I do require decent battery life. Slim Bean is giving me more battery run-time than I’ve ever had with any previous firmware. Stand-by battery time has been particularly amazing, even though my battery is more than two years old. I’ve had days where the phone has been off the charger for over 36 hours and the low battery warning hasn’t gone off yet. Those are particularly low-use days, though.

The screenshot above is from a pretty average day around the house, connected to Wi-Fi the whole time. It does phenomenally well in this case. Even with over an hour of screen time I still had over one third of my battery remaining after being unplugged for nearly 24 hours.

On days with a more normal 50/50 split between Wi-Fi and cell data, the battery drains quite a bit faster. Even then it still has no problem staying alive for 18 hours with a similar amount of screen-on time.

My phone is running Slim Bean 2.8 plus the Semaphore kernel.

Is it stable?

Everything except the GPS seems to be working just fine.

Other than that I can’t complain. Scrolling around within individual applications is noticeably more buttery, but switching between apps is still a slow experience. Using the Nexus 7 every day doesn’t help my feelings about that.

What’s wrong with the GPS?

Turning on GPS causes the phone not to sleep properly any more until it is powered off. It will just eat through battery in a matter of hours, even if you later turn off GPS. This seems to have been a problem on every single firmware I can remember using, probably all the way back to the day I opened the box.

When the GPS is on, it is sometimes able to find some satellites and get a lock. Maybe…

Semaphore kernel tweaks

I am running Semaphore kernel on my Vibrant and I’ve made a few tweaks using the Semaphore Manager app:

• Changed the I/O scheduler to Simple I/O
• Enabled Bigmem
• Set LiveOC to 114%
• Changed to the SmartAssV2 CPU Governor

Even overclocked to 1140 MHz I am still getting better battery life now than I ever did before.

Update 2013-04-16: Upgraded to Slim Bean 4.2.2

I’ve been happily and lazily ignoring the messages telling me that for months. Slim Bean’s little update manager app kept informing me that there was a minor update, but I was happy with how the phone was running and didn’t think it’d be worth the effort to update.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend was picking on me a bit because my aging Vibrant was only running Android version 4.1.2. I told him that there was no 4.2 release of Slim Bean. A few days later, I learned that I was lying to him.

Updating the phone was a snap. I did not reset the phone. I just flashed the Slim Bean, Google Apps, Google Now, and the latest Semaphore kernel zip files and wiped the cache partition. Nothing terribly weird happened, other than one or two icons on my home screen needed to be recreated.

The upgrade seems to have made my old Vibrant just a bit smoother and faster. It could just be my imagination, though.

Last year I set up a key binding to automatically expand zsh global aliases as you type. I am definitely not the first person to do this, but I recently discovered a much cleaner way to accomplish the same thing.

zsh already ships with a function called expand-alias. I was able to replace the majority of my own code with a call to this existing function. I probably could have almost gotten away with just binding expand-alias to the space bar. For my uses, though, I think this would have been an ugly solution.

I don’t often want to see regular aliases expanded. That would just clutter up my command line too often. I also use the pretty standard practice of using only capital letters in the names of my global aliases. This made it easy to construct a regex as a filter for my globalias function:

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globalias() {
   if [[ $LBUFFER =~ ' [A-Z0-9]+$' ]]; then
     zle _expand_alias
     zle expand-word
   fi
   zle self-insert
}

zle -N globalias

bindkey " " globalias
bindkey "^ " magic-space           # control-space to bypass completion
bindkey -M isearch " " magic-space # normal space during searches

If you’d like to try it out you can just add the above code to your zsh config file, or you can download and source oh-my-zsh plugin.

It should be no problem to loosen up or completely remove the filtering regex if expanding only all-caps aliases isn’t to your liking.

Update: I added zle expand-word to the globalias function. I have one or two global aliases that end in a file glob. This makes them immediately appear expanded.

I’ve been using Swype for quite a few years now. I am a really big fan of Swype and I don’t think I would be happy without a sweeping/gesture-based keyboard. I recently learned about a keyboard, called Keymonk, that allows you to gesture with two fingers at once. I’ve been using the free version of Keymonk for almost a week now and I have been mostly happy with it.

Today I installed the stock Android 4.2 keyboard on my Nexus 7. This new version of the default Android keyboard also allows for gesture-based typing.

Swype

I’ve used Swype for a long time and I am very fond of it. Of the three gesture-based keyboards I’ve tried, Swype is definitely the most accurate of the bunch. There are often times when I know that I’ve completely botched up the spelling of a word very, very badly but I just keep going and Swype more often than not guesses exactly what I was trying to input.

One of my favorite Swype gestures is sweeping above the keyboard to capitalize a letter. I try to do this on the other two keyboards all the time.

Swype is currently free but you have to sign up for an account, download their installer, log into their installer, and then finally install Swype. I’d be willing to pay to not have to jump through these hoops every time I get a new device.

Keymonk

Keymonk allows you to use two fingers (likely thumbs) to input words. I’ve had a lot of fun thinking up words like “inconceivable” and “indubitably” to input with both thumbs. It is a little confusing at first but I’m starting to catch on a bit. I might be typing faster with two thumbs now that I do with one finger.

Fortunately, you can use Keymonk one-handed, just like Swype. I also like the way Keymonk highlights the key your finger is currently touching during your gesture. This makes it easy to see when you are overshooting your target.

Keymonk also feels like the fastest of these three keyboards. It pops up much faster than Swype on my old Samsung Galaxy S. It even pops up noticeably faster than either of the other two keyboards on my Nexus 7.

Keymonk’s method of inputting numbers and symbols is superior to Swype. You can still tap shift/numlock and peck away at numbers like with any other keyboard but you can also gesture from the numlock key straight to the desired number/symbol. Punctuation input works in a similar manner.

Since I’m only currently using the free version of Keymonk, I am not able add words to its dictionary. The free version also does not automatically insert a space after punctuation. That bites me a lot because I’m in the habit of Swype doing this for me.

The quick load time, better number/symbol input, and the lack of an annoying installer/updater may very well be worth the four bucks. I think I’d like to see an update or two before I commit to using Keymonk on a more permanent basis, though.

The new Android 4.2 keyboard

The new Android keyboard isn’t bad, but it sure isn’t Swype. It seems to do an even worse job of guessing the correct word out of my random flailing about as Keymonk.

Along with Swype’s capitalization gesture, I find myself very much missing Swype’s “punctuation to spacebar” gesture for quickly inserting punctuation. Keymonk has its own gesture that fills this role.

It is interesting how the Android keyboard prints the partial word that you’ve spelled above your finger and it follows you around as you gesture. I’m not certain how useful that is, though, because my finger moves around pretty quickly. It also gently lights up the key your finger is hovering over, similar to Keymonk.

Which keyboard should I use?

In my opinion, Keymonk doesn’t have far to go to catch up with Swype. I wanted to wait for Keymonk to be updated once or twice before buying it, but writing this post has just about convinced me that the advantages of Keymonk might be worth buying.

Update: Keymonk seems to be dead

I’m pretty disappointed that Keymonk hasn’t been updated in over a year. I still try to use it every once in a while, but it is pretty buggy on newer versions of Android. It will randomly stop responding to gestures and stop suggesting words.

I’ve never actually measured my typing speed with any Android keyboards, but when I use Keymonk it feels like I’m typing much faster. I really miss that.