Cyberdeck: Using It

2021-02-12T21:05

I've been trying to fall in love with the Cyberdeck, but it isn't happening.

I had a similar experiment in 2014. I tried using my Nexus 7 as a thin-client to connect to a VPS that ran my workload. Between JuiceSSH, a web browser and some very polished Android apps, I hoped I would find a reasonable substitute for my laptop.

I was sorely disappointed. Android's keyboard support is very second-class. Most desktop operating systems evolved in a time when keyboard was king. You can see this with keyboard navigable menu options and a vast array of global keyboard shortcuts. These just don't exist in Android. For example, MacOS has 59 document shortcuts.¹ Android might have equivalents for less than 10 of those. This wasn't as big of an issue in the terminal, but writing in address bars and text boxes bothered me.

To avoid those problems, this time I attempted to just make the terminal work. That shouldn't be hard, right? Well, problems still remain.

The keyboard stops working when I set my application to fullscreen immersive mode.² Whether that is an operating system or application problem, I don't know.

I also found that Termux refuses to disable the bar containing modifier keys for the soft keyboard, even when a physical keyboard connected. The config says that setting `extra-keys-style = none` should work, but it didn't.³ I looking through the Termux issue tracker, and the number of open issues didn't fill me with confidence.⁴

So I figured I could avoid the problem by using JuiceSSH to connect to localhost. That worked, but it kept randomly painting 'q' letters to my screen everywhere.

I persevered through the difficulties and started a post on my phone. After not long, my SSH connections froze and I was getting frustrated with the Meta key not working. I use a lot of bindings from readline in Vim's insert mode; things like M-b to go back a word, or M-backspace to backspace to the word-separator rather than whitespace. These didn't work because it keeps sending C-<Space>. Why? I don't know.

I could try to engineer my way past those problems. I could use Tmux/Screen and send different keycodes from my keyboard, but I can't engineer my way out of my phones screen being too small. When attaching a phone to a keyboard, it's quite a distance further from your face than when you're holding it. To accommodate for this, the text must be enlarged. This prevented me from seeing much more than the current paragraph I was writing. Without the surrounding context, I found it difficult to write. I had no anchor. I'm not sure why it matters; I don't have have the surrounding context when I speak. Perhaps with time I would get used to it and maybe even gain focus, but once it comes time to edit what I've written, seeing more than a paragraph at a time is important.

I won't continue trying to make an Android phone suitable. I might try my Nexus 7 which has a slightly bigger screen and an older version of LineageOS, version 7 I think. Perhaps PostmarketOS would be more suitable than Android, I'm not sure. I would prefer to not add to the number of devices I must maintain and keep charged.

For now it seems that my laptop, despite it's crappy keyboard is still the best option I have.

¹ MacOS Keyboard Shortcuts

² Fullscreen Immersive - No Ads, No Root

³ Termux Touch Keyboard

⁴ Termux Issue Tracker

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