A new unistroke text entry method for handheld or wearable devices is designed to provide high accuracy and stability of motion. The user makes characters by traversing the edges and diagonals of a geometric pattern, e.g. a square, imposed over the usual text input area. Gesture recognition is accomplished not through pattern recognition but through the sequence of corners that are hit. This means that the full stroke path is unimportant and the recognition is highly deterministic, enabling better accuracy than other gestural alphabets. This input technique works well using a template with a square hole placed over a touch-sensitive surface, such as on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), and with a square boundary surrounding a joystick, which might be used on a cell-phone or game controller. Another feature of the input technique is that capital letters are made by ending the stroke in a particular corner, rather than through a mode change as in other gestural input techniques. Because of the rules governing abstracts, this abstract should not be used to construe the claims.