I personally like using the touch pads for hunt/peck style typing. This may not be what youre asking, but i find it reasonably useable for my needs
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Steam Deck
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That’s what I use but the triggers changing to type whatever you’re hovering makes using shift hard. I wish triggers were shift only and you could just tap the touchpads to type.
That's a toggle under keyboard settings. With the toggle off (which is default behavior I think) the left trigger is shift and the right trigger is enter.
That’s a huge lifesaver. I genuinely was just giving up when I had to type passwords in
Typing my password was what prompted me to ask the question. Looking at my 20 character random password (I don't have a manager installed on the deck) I decided staring blankly out the window for two hours was preferable to attempting to enter the characters - blindly, since the password box was unmodifyingly hidden behind the pop-up keyboard - and hoping I got them all correct and every keypress actually registered, and only registered once.
I don't like how soft the tap to click is on the trackpads. I bump the click threshold up to about 9000.
On Desktop mode, I made a controller config that binds the shoulder triggers to just be shoulder triggers. Use the right trackpad as mouse, click as LMB. Left trackpad as scroll wheel (vertical), click as RMB. It would be nice if there was a real 2d scrolly-polly mode that I could bind to the left trackpad, instead of having it emit mousewheel button events.
When it comes to typing on the deck, I cry. It's terrible. Carry around a folding keyboard if things come to that.
Okay, I feel a little silly for not realizing there was an adjustable threshold on the trackpads - I've been avoiding using them because of how touchy they are. (To be fair, I've only had my deck for 16 months, lol).
I'm still a bit baffled that the keyboard is so frustrating to use, given how moderately adequate most mobile device keyboards are. I hate to say it, but even MS's tablet-mode keyboard, as bad as it is, is a substantial upgrade from the deck's.
I think that the Deck's touchscreen and keyboard code is just not a priority at all. It has to be barely good enough to type in your wifi password. From there, you scan a QR code to sign in to Steam (which was absolutely an amazing development), and maybe type in four letters to search for a game you want to install.
Direct manipulation of the keyboard is awkward because you aren't holding the screen very closely like on a phone. Doing that is more like "gorilla-grip one side, and poke keys with your other index finger quickly, before you drop the damn thing". In addition to that, the keys don't register very well, possibly because it doesn't have a phone's clever DWIM heuristics. And even when you're trackpad typing, the keyboard laaags, because we only have eight 3.4 ghz logical cores 🤪.
As far as I'm concerned, valve has the right priorities. Keep their noses to the Proton and Vulkan and Gamescope grindstones. Make it so that nobody ever feels the need to wipe and reinstall their system to fix some unfathomable bug. The keyboard can keep right on sucking, so long as "make games just friggin work" moves forward.