A C library for creating T9 typing systems. Contribute to FoxMoss/libt9 development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Why we don’t have t9 support on tv remotes???
I gotta aim and peck some bullshit or open up some app with a QR code instead. Give me T9
I can’t stand TV keyboard input, it’s wildly frustrating. I’d be happy even with “abc” style, T9 would be even better ofc.
I can kind of understand how we got here - a fractured system of various vendors, TV makers, and customized android implementations led us to apps having their own keyboards, even if the TV offers a native on-screen keyboard, and for some reason most of those are laid out in a keypad style with A in the top-left which goes against everything the majority of users have known, even back to typewriters.
I know my comment got longwinded, it’s just…things could have and should have gotten better by now, but I’ll be arsed if I’m gonna pull out my phone to type the four letters needed to scroll to the movie I’m looking for.
By jimmaswell 2025-06-240:522 reply Have you tried plugging a usb keyboard into your TV? It's always worked for me. My lifelong habit of connecting keyboards/mice to random devices to see what happens has been overall fruitful - hell, even the Wii supported keyboards iirc. Used my Android to test an Apple Magic Mouse at a yardsale recently too.
Nice! I’ll be honest, it’s not worth it. I’m just at the point of “if I can’t do it more easily with the remote, I’ll settle with doing it frustratingly with the remote”. I could probably get my Bluetooth keyboard paired up to the tv, but how often am I going to use it compared to how often it’s sitting in the living room unused?
It’s really more that I’m frustrated with the poor UX choices that will never go away, or at least don’t appear to be going anywhere.
By dspillett 2025-06-249:29 > I’m just at the point of “if I can’t do it more easily with the remote, I’ll settle with doing it frustratingly with the remote”.
This is one of the reasons that, while I actually pay for Netflix & Prime, I still torrent most of what I watch and play it of my little media array via an rPi plugged into the TV. Finding things is easier, there are a couple of extra steps getting the content if I don't already have it locally, then interacting with it is easier.
From GP comment:
> Have you tried plugging a usb keyboard into your TV?
On the rPi, my remote is a mini USB keyboard, though with wireless comms between it and the USB dongle.
The TV I have now could probably have a keyboard plugged in directly too, but I've had this setup since before I had a TV that claimed to be smart.
By igigxicicu 2025-06-241:20 ps2 even supported usb keyboards and mice.
silent scope with a mouse is cheesy but fun
By mikepurvis 2025-06-2321:19 Speaking of novel inputs, one of the only consistent uses of the PS4/5 controller's integrated trackpad is when games pop up a text input modal.
Always kind of saddened me there weren't more games that did interesting things with it, even things like scrolling around an overworld map.
By zzo38computer 2025-06-2320:414 reply If you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed.
For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in that position, both are displayed.
So, this variant is you enter the entire title (or a substring of the title) first before it predicts what words you meant. After it is entered then all results are displayed, with a number next to each one, and then you must push the number corresponding to the one that you want.
On Android, I always enjoy how the dial pad in the phone app will let you start typing in numbers and it tries to match into a name or number. My favorite one, 666, brings up "Mom" as the first result.
This feature is missing the final 20% in an infuriating way - it doesn't match characters with accents, so i can't use it to find my family.
By arcanemachiner 2025-06-240:57 Maybe you could add an alternate name for each contact without the diacritics?
By worthless-trash 2025-06-247:06 Check the living room, sometimes near the tv. Usually my family come home when they are super hungry, so you can just wait till then.
By ortusdux 2025-06-2321:05 Some phone directories use this method. "Please dial the numbers that correspond to the the first 4 letters of the last name of the person you would like to reach."
By im3w1l 2025-06-2321:00 This sounds like it would be mostly great but occasionally really awful if you get a lot of matches.
By GauntletWizard 2025-06-2320:46 I'd take multitap any day over the terrible systems that we have now, with faux QWERTY keyboards displayed on screen (or worse, the whole alphabet in a line on Apple TV devices)
By dsp_person 2025-06-2320:41 smart tvs too busy adding spyware and AI bloat
maybe streamio + unified remote?
By guywhocodes 2025-06-245:41 A few years ago I started building this. The idea was to send the word and when cycling send the same number of backspaces before the next.
I guess I got busy with other things
By jimmaswell 2025-06-240:46 I've discovered you can just plug a keyboard and even mouse into smart TV's. Get a wireless keyboard with a trackpad on it and you barely need the remote anymore. The Windows key even brings me to the home screen by default on my LG C1.
By ensignavenger 2025-06-2322:14 I had a Vizio tv that just gave up the ghost on me. The remote had a full keyboard on the back! Best remote I have ever had. It ran the Yahoo connected TV platform. It was fantastic. (except the whole vizio spying on its customers thing... but the hardware and YTV platform were great!)
By stronglikedan 2025-06-2321:26 Because that would require at least 8 dedicated buttons, instead of 5 buttons that can be used for other things when not in the keyboard context (dirs + enter). Of course, some manufacturers will sell you an upgraded remote separately to help make life easier.
By gaazoh 2025-06-248:45 Very cool, I implemented this once in python, it's a fun exercise, and knowledge that is gradually disappearing (modern phones with 12-key physical keyboards usually don't even have a T9 implementation, and when they do it doesn't perform well, even higher-tech KaiOS phones).
Although I appreciate the effort, I see a couple of issues with this implementation:
* The demo doesn't seem to work properly, the first thing I tried to type was "hello world", but it didn't recognize "hello" and I got "43556" instead.
* The word list is generated generated C code, which makes it hard to use other dictionaries (languages) or to add words during use (you can't add all place and people names to the list, but people are going to want to reference a handful of them many times). Loading from and appending to a plain text word list would make more sense, and maybe additionally use a custom binary format for the trie structure for fast loading into memory once a word list is imported on first use (hardware that would benefit from T9 might not be fast enough for conversion to be "instant")
* Non-latin script support would be nice. Although I have no knowledge whether Greek or Cyrillic languages used a T9 mechanism, it would be a minor change to define. Korean 12-key typing is also very cool, but I don't know whether that counts as T9.
By throw0101c 2025-06-2320:311 reply "Flip phone typing" = T9:
the library is named libt9, I believe the author is aware of this...
Then why is a flip phone in the title? That was not specific to flip phones at all.
By stronglikedan 2025-06-2321:245 reply Because vastly more people will know what "flip phone typing" is over "T9 typing".
By thfuran 2025-06-2321:28 Will they? I don't think I've ever heard it called that before.
By pjmlp 2025-06-246:35 Plenty of feature phones were not flip phones.
By blueflow 2025-06-248:09 Probably in regions of the world where flip phones were the dominant form factor for phones...
By szszrk 2025-06-246:22 It depends on region.
Flip phone is obviously English only. T9 was used globally. My parents knew what T9 was, and so we're all my friends.
I figured other way around… Kids These Days might be more likely to have heard of a “flip phone” than “t9” and thus “engage” with this “content”
By foxmoss 2025-06-242:34 I had not heard of T9 before starting the project and getting interested, I'm too young to have experienced owning a pre-touch screen phone. I don't know if the average HN reader knows what T9 is, so I went with a term that I was fairly certain most people would be familiar with. Is that so people engage with my work? I certainly found the project fascinating, I made the library to share that fascination. If I can get more people to implement and use T9 and alike systems I think my work has has been a success.
By numpad0 2025-06-2322:34 Maybe "T9" is trademarked?
By throw0101c 2025-06-2321:20 > I believe the author is aware of this...
What about those reading the headline and deciding whether to follow the link or not?
