The board
The keys are regular hexagons laid out like a honeycomb: five rows that alternate between six and seven keys, each row centred. Three keys are split across the middle: the upper half and lower half of each are separate keys.
- Left of the middle row: comma on top, full stop below.
- Right of the middle row: exclamation mark on top, question mark below.
- Bottom row: emoji on top,
?123(numbers and symbols) below, and Enter beside it. - Two space keys sit either side of f and h in the middle row, one for each thumb. They do much more than type spaces, as you’ll see below.
When you touch a key, a bubble above it shows what it will type, including the capital or symbol you’re about to get from a flick or a hold.
Capitals: flick up
Flick any letter up to type its capital. The direction doesn’t need to be straight up; up-left and up-right work too. You rarely need it: Flikzi starts every sentence with a capital, and it fixes words that are always capitalised, such as I and Monday.
To capitalise a word you’ve already typed, flick the right space key up (it shows Aa). With text selected, the same flick capitalises the first letter of the selection.
Symbols and accents: hold and slide
Every letter carries up to two small marks in its top corners. Hold the key, slide left for the left mark or right for the right mark, and let go. The digits 1 to 0 sit on the left of q, w, e, r, t, y, u, i, o and p, in the order they have on a QWERTY keyboard. Keep sliding right and the accented versions of the letter follow: hold e and slide right for è, é, ê, ë and more.
This is the full set:
| Key | Slide left | Slide right | Keep sliding right |
|---|---|---|---|
| w | 2 | ^ | – |
| e | 3 | ~ | è é ê ë ē ę |
| t | 5 | [ | – |
| y | 6 | ] | ý ÿ |
| i | 8 | > | ì í î ï ī |
| o | 9 | { | ò ó ô ö õ ø ō œ |
| q | 1 | % | – |
| a | á | @ | à á â ä ã å ā æ |
| r | 4 | | | – |
| g | = | & | – |
| u | 7 | < | ù ú û ü ū |
| l | ł | ) | ł |
| p | 0 | } | – |
| f | \ | _ | – |
| h | ` | - | – |
| z | ž | * | ž ź ż |
| s | ß | # | ß ś š |
| d | / | $ | – |
| n | ñ | ! | ñ ń |
| m | µ | ? | – |
| j | – | + | – |
| k | – | ( | – |
| x | × | " | – |
| c | ç | ' | ç ć č |
| v | – | : | – |
| b | – | ; | – |
The split punctuation keys have marks too: hold the comma for a semicolon, the full stop for a colon, the exclamation mark for a double quote and the question mark for an apostrophe.
Numbers
- Hold q, w, e, r, t, y, u, i, o or p and slide left for its digit: q is 1, w is 2, and so on to p for 0.
- Tap ?123 for the numbers and symbols layer. Tap a space afterwards and you’re back on letters.
- Turn on the number row in settings for a permanent strip of digits above the letters. The letters then drop their digit marks.
- On wide screens a number pad sits between the two halves of the keyboard.
Deleting without a delete key
Flikzi gives you four ways to delete, from one letter to a whole sentence.
Slide a space key: one letter at a time
Press either space key and slide left straight away. Each step deletes one letter. Slide right and they are undeleted, one per step, so you can find exactly the spot you want before letting go.
Hold, then slide: amber, orange, red
To delete bigger pieces, hold a space key before you slide. Holding doesn’t delete anything; it chooses the size of each step, and the key changes colour so you always know which size you have:
| Colour | Hold for | Each slide step deletes |
|---|---|---|
| Amber | under 1.6 seconds | One letter |
| Orange | 1.6 seconds | One word |
| Red | 3 seconds | One sentence |
Then, still holding, slide left to delete one piece per step and slide right to undelete. The size stays fixed once you start sliding. Slide up to cancel: everything you deleted in that move comes back.
Swipe a letter: a whole word
A quick swipe left across any letter deletes the last word. A quick swipe right brings back what you last deleted.
Undo an autocorrection
If autocorrect changed a word you meant, swipe left straight after it. The word goes back to what you typed, and Flikzi won’t correct it again.
Switching between English and Chinese
Flick the left space key up to switch between English and Simplified Chinese pinyin. The key shows the current language, EN or 中. How pinyin typing works in Flikzi.
Emoji
Tap the smiley half-key to open the emoji panel. It has categories, your recent emoji, and its own delete key. Emoji that have skin tones show a small mark in the corner: hold one to choose a tone, and Flikzi remembers your choice for that emoji. While you type, matching emoji appear in the suggestion strip, and after a space it suggests emoji for the word you just finished.
Suggestions and autocorrect
As you type, the strip above the keys suggests words, and after a space it predicts the next one. Tap a suggestion to use it; Flikzi adds the space for you. When you press space, obvious typos are corrected, missing capitals are added (i becomes I) and missing apostrophes are filled in (dont becomes don’t).
Put the cursor at the end of an earlier word and Flikzi picks it up again: new letters extend it and the suggestions cover the whole word. All of this runs on your phone. Why that matters.