Defensive Publication: Ring-Based Character Entry with Live Corpus Pruning

Conventional text search on a touch device summons an on-screen QWERTY keyboard — an interface foreign to a purpose-built instrument, and oversized for the task of finding an item that already exists in a closed corpus. This document discloses a keyboard-free search-entry method for hierarchical data navigators, comprising in combination: (1) a rotatable ring of characters (A–Z, a visual seam, 0–9) presented in the navigator's own focus-ring idiom, rotated by drag or flick through a fixed magnifier lens, with no keyboard chrome of any kind; (2) the strike — tapping the lens itself commits the settled character to the query string; (3) the carriage — the committed string sits just left of the lens, end-anchored so each strike pushes prior characters leftward in typewriter platen fashion, where each committed character is its own backspace key: tapping character k truncates the string to k−1, returns that character to the lens as the settled selection, and widens the candidate set, serving single and multi-level undo with no delete key; (4) live pruning against a closed corpus, the ring rebuilding after each strike to contain only those characters with which some corpus entry can continue the current prefix, so the ring visibly shortens as the query converges and a dead-end strike is refused; (5) candidates as children — completions populate the navigator's ordinary child-preview region rather than a separate list UI, updating live as characters stream through the lens during rotation; (6) scope inheritance — the search corpus is the subtree of the user's current position, requiring no scope selector; and (7) arrival as migration — the chosen candidate travels into the lens, its true sibling set pours onto the ring, and the honest ancestor stack is planted, so ascending from the found item walks the real hierarchy. Measured on a catalog corpus of 1,032 model names: a mean of approximately 2.1 strikes places the target among 14 or fewer visible candidates; worst case 5. The disclosure distinguishes the method from index typewriters (Hall 1881, Lambert 1902), T9 and predictive text, television and console letter-strip selectors, Dasher (Ward and MacKay), and arcade initials entry. This is a defensive publication: it discloses the method to establish it as prior art, so that the method remains free for all to use and cannot be patented by any party. It was first published on 2026-07-22 in release v3.18.0 of the wheel project, and complements an earlier defensive publication covering the navigator itself (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21434298).