Tips ‘n’ Tricks

A collection of tips and tricks that can prove useful when using the TextBlade.

Often hit Enter by accident. Many users have reported (particularly when first getting used to the TextBlade) that they accidentally hit Enter when they meant backspace. An easy 'fix' for this is to remap the Enter key on the alpha layer to either do nothing or something benign (such as insert a space). You can then use the Enter on the Green layer when you really want enter. When you are fully acclimatized to the TextBlade you may find you want to re-activate the Enter on the Alpha layer.

If you use QWERTY, you will have noticed that the semicolon key is missing from the alpha layer as in the supplied maps it is moved to the green layer. If you are very used to this, you can put it back, move the quote key to enter, and use enter only from the green layer. Having said that it may be better to acclimatize yourself to the new default position on the Green layer as that puts it next to the colon character which is a logical position for semi-colon.

You can map shift+backspace to “forward delete” (the Del key on Windows keyboards). This means that you can map green+backspace to “delete previous word”, which in most cases is a much faster way to fix a typo than to go back and fix individual letters.

Easier access to ESC key. If you use the ESC key a lot and are used to it being at the top-left of the keyboard, then you may find it more intuitive if you map the ESC key to the alpha layer at the top left (where TAB is mapped by default) and move the TAB key down to the unused option below that. If you do this you will want to also do it on the Alpha Shift layer, and probably on the Num layer as well (you unfortunately cannot currently do this on the Edit layer as well - hopefully that restriction will be lifted at some point in the future).

Make a note of jump slot Bluetooth IDs. You will find that for a given TextBlade that it will identify itself at the Bluetooth level as a device with a name of the form TextBlade n-xx where n is the slot number and xx is a number that increments any time you force clear a slot setting. Knowing this can be useful when trying to set up the Bluetooth pairing as it is not at all unusual for more than one slot to show up when scanning for Bluetooth devices, and you want to make sure you select the right one when trying to set up the pairing for a particular jump point.

Do not try to pair any host with Jump Slot 6 if you have received a Bluetooth dongle from WayTools with your TextBlade. The dongle will arrive already paired to Jump Slot 6 and attempting to use it for a different host will break that pairing, and trying to re-establish the pairing with the dongle can be a little tricky. If by any chance you do lose this pairing then you will need to use the VM approach documented in the Dongler part of this wiki.

Repeating Spaces: Since the SpaceBlade invokes the Green layer if held down for more than a brief press then it is not obvious how you can get space characters to auto-repeat. Continually pressing-releasing the SpaceBlade is one option but this can be inconvenient to use. The trick is to map space to another character position on the TextBlade as well as having it in its default position on the SpaceBlade. Which position you select is up to you, but on the standard QWERTY mapping one that is free to use for such a purpose is Tab on the Green layer. If you press and hold the selected key it will then start auto-repeating space characters.