We need a programming keyboard on iOS

+November 15, 2015 +

We do. If you ever tried to say something on GitHub (web) or StackOverflow (web or app) on iOS, you'll probably agree with me. The stock keyboard (or any third party keyboard that I've heard of) is simply awful at this. Typing on iOS software keyboard is unpleasant enough to begin with, but behold:

Auto"correct" messes up everything as fast as you can type, which isn't really fast anyway; might as well call it autorot.
The backtick is a click plus a loooong click (on the single quote key) plus another click away. Good luck typing code in Markdown,¹ especially if you use GFM fenced code block like all of us do.
Brackets, curly braces, the underscore, the pound, etc. are all three clicks away.

The solution is pretty obvious actually. I don't know about smaller phones, but the software keyboard on a landscape iPhone 6 Plus has four rows, which takes up about 40% of vertical screen estate, and it has fourteen keys in the top row. With a little bit of effort it can be made into a five-row, full-sized keyboard (without arrow keys perhaps) without taking up a ridiculous amount of space. Since the horizontal 6 Plus could handle it, any iPad should be able to handle it too; definitely shouldn't be an iPad Pro-only luxury. Turn off autocorrect on top of that, and you get a decent programming (or better put, programmer-oriented) keyboard.

This is merely a rant, but it would awesome if anyone sets out to make one.

To be fair, typing BBCode is even worse. Unfortunately that's what Ars Technica use, and I've given up on commenting there.↩︎