[Feature Request] Proposal for Vibration behaviour of "Spacebar Cursor Swiping"

[paskalito]

I love the Spacebar Cursor swiping, i use it all the time!!
However it is sometimes a bit hard to select the exact position of the cursor. AKA to see were exactly it is. was it to far already or not far enough..

Therefore i had the Idea to add haptic feedback to it.

Curretly:
There is a "double vibration" when i start a "move cursor" action. and that's it.

Wish:
In my mind there should be a vibration for every character that the cursor passes.
If we swipe real fast, this is maybe not feasible, but for that we could have generic "as long as the fast swiping continues" vibration, but whenever we slowdown, it should give us physical short burst vibration feedback for every character we "overcome".

Stretch-wish:
i would even like to be able to have this vibration to be able to be tuned on and off separately from the normal vibrations. as i generally do not need the vibration but the "swipe search" vibration i think i would love

[Spike-from-NH]

I have the same problem and I think the root is not the lack of feedback but that the highlighting color is not very distinct—It's hard to see what you have selected.

[paskalito]

@Spike-from-NH do you talk about the case then holding "shift" and then selecting a set of characters?
because i was only talking about setting the cursor at places (without selection)

[Spike-from-NH]

Yes, that's right. I have no problem with cursor movement by sliding at all.

[Julow]

This is a brilliant idea! I added vibration and tried just stopping the vibration when sliding fast in #1203
Can you tell me what you think ? The debug build is at the end of this page: https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/actions/runs/23100460989?pr=1203

[paskalito]

@Julow thank you for the flowers! And of course your inspiring keyboard! And your debug build!

I tested it here is my findings:
Firstoff: The whole debug build and how it all works with the normal installed is brilliant!

timing of the vibration

Just for my feeling i would like to have the vibration first, and after i felt the vibration i "know" intuitivly that the cursor now will have "overcome" exactly one character. (hence on vibration.)
right now it somehow feels that the cursot ist moved first, and then the vibration is second - kind of confirming the movement.
no worries if this is not possible, because of delays of vibration motor etc.

how it vibrates.

So my original problem was that i move my finger carefully to overcome one character, yet it happens frequently that instead i moved 2/3.
Now i get individual vibrations when i slowly go move the cursor and the vibrations disappear when it goes faster.
This leads to the following: i still move sometimes over 2 characters but i only get one or none vibration. ( i think if i do it fast)

this is the only case where it seems to "not work"

Proposal.
ALWAYS do the first 3 vibrations on "overcoming a characer" (also when moving fast) when.

• we start swiping
• change direction of swiping.
• after we restart swiping again after we made a (very short) break

additionally if we fall under the to fast threshold we always get individual vibrations (as we do currently)

this way :

• i should always be able to know/feel if i moved one or two or "more" charcacters (whish should be sufficient) - even if the happen to move one or two characters "fast"
• i can can still have silence after 3 vibrations on very long swipe
• if i am slow enough i can still get "unlimited" vibrations for every character

Did it feel bad with continuous "long" vibration on "fast sliding"?

generally i feel that it works dough and generally feels better than with no vibration :)

[dzaima]

For what it's worth, I've had a half-broken personal patch for vibrating on sliding for a couple months (kinda forgot that it wasn't upstream oops :|).

My patch didn't have any speed cap, which I found fine (but I'd guess it depends a lot on the hardware, could be very noisy if it's not a very quick vibration; I had to turn down the vibration duration a lot on my old phone to make it not overly noisy, but my new phone doesn't care about the vibration length and does something that works nicely regardless of event count).

Might be reasonable to set the vibrator_vibrate duration to like config.vibrate_duration / speed or something? No clue how messy might that be across different hardware though.

Switched to julow's patch when it came out, but had to bump up VIBRATION_MAX_SPEED to 3 because the 1.5 was too far from what I was used to (and I like the vibration spam anyways); without that indeed important vibrations are dropped even on few-char swipes.

I don't feel the vibration being delayed at least (could be me being used to it, but I'm fairly certain it is very immediate), so probably just a device hardware question.

..Also TIL the swiped character count isn't linearly proportional to swiped distance; neat!

[dzaima]

Might be reasonable to set the vibrator_vibrate duration to like config.vibrate_duration / speed or something? No clue how messy might that be across different hardware though.

Attempted that at https://github.com/dzaima/Unexpected-Keyboard/commits/fancy-vibrate/ on top of julow's existing PR - feels pretty nice on my old phone! (my new phone is unaffected as it doesn't care about vibration strength; and feels nice either way)

Includes a commit making speed smoothing much more predictable - my old phone seems to result in calls to update_speed with rather unpredictable delta times (sometimes 33ms, sometimes 16ms, sometimes a sequence of 8ms; with 1ms/2ms sprinkled in every now and then), which the previous code always scaled in via a factor of 0.7, under-representing big time jumps and over-representing small ones.
My version guarantees that a update_speed(x, ...) with delta_ms = y gives the same speed as two update_speed(x/2, ...)s with delta_ms = y/2, and as such makes the speed a lot more smooth.