Canon:

I thought about this quite a bit and think the reason that the ABC layouts are used is that every locale has a slightly different keyboard layout so international corps are afraid of the QWERTY approach not fitting anyone but the UK/US folks.

Adding different keyboard layouts per country is definitely an overkill but maybe there are hybrid solutions, thoughts?

few points,

0. Playstation (which also does not support keyboard and nor have touchscreen,but a touchpad) uses QWERTY as default and is sold worldwide.

1. Although Alphabetical order might not matter that much, but separating alphabets,from numbers and symbols might be a good idea. (numeric keys screen differnt from alphabet keys screen as in conon and other cameras).

2. Usablity wise, above point can be argued, but still all the characters in one screen gives very cluttered look, to small extend.

3. Except for France, all the major countries use QWERTY. So, "not fitting anyone except UK/US folk" might not be true, I live in India and have been using QWERTY since I knew what the keyboard was.

4. Hybrid keyboard would only give a small learning curve to get friendly for the user.

Small correction, not all major countries, e.g. Germany uses QWERTZ.

right, then lets give a QWERTY keyboard prototype a go.

I would opt for upper case only to reduce size/complexity.

We will also need numbers and a few special characters like "-_[]#+,.()/"

Hello!! This was till 11 January 2020, after taking your and everyone's suggestion, I am incorporating them into the keyboard. I have made quite some changes since then, like changing the underlying algo to an optimized one(using an array of char and not drawing each button individually, which bAndiT1983 had suggested), added knob control, and a few more still doing...(side buttons and up and down navigation and other things)

Very cool, thanks!

One thing to think about is how to "finish" typing as "Enter" adds one character currently I assume -> Could say "Done" and the knob push adds a character?

hmm...I can use the knob to select the alphabets(pressing the knob) since it is being used to navigate(trial basis), and keep the enter button reserved for when the user had finished typing.

Yes, that's what I meant :)

Progress So far..

I couldn't share the complete progress in today's IRC meet due to network issues, but this is the keyboard screen. now, I am adding carriage in the text field, as suggested by Sebastian, and changing the code by using proper data structures (unsigned char or uint8_t), while using the custom button method instead of pushbutton, bandiT1983 is helping with this.

Stay tuned for more ;)

Beautiful, keep it up! 💃

Please clean up the keyboard code and create a PR for this branch, then code review will follow and ultimately end in a merge.