Comment by Dave@lemmy.nz on GBoard replacement?

Title.

I’m not sure I’m ready to go all “lineageOS full degoogle” on my phone because some rather necessary day-to-day apps for me will freak out if I have root, let alone a modified OS. Buuuut GBoard has gotten right in my tit, and now they’re offering nightmarish AI generated emoji and I’m like “NO”. So.

I don’t really care about predictive text or swipe-typing or any of that stuff, I mostly just type normally.

The only nice-to-haves that might entice me would be support for one-handed mode and a configurable keyboard layout.

I’ve struggled with keyboards. Some to try out are OpenBoard, Heliboard, and Florisboard. All are on F-Droid.

But my favourite so far is FUTO Keyboard. Not without issues but I like it the best. It’s not on F-Droid but you can use Obtanium to keep it up to date from the GitHub releases.

If you like weird shit, check out Thumb-key. It’s on F-Droid and made by one of the Lemmy developers.

Seems you tested a lot of options. I’ve been testing Heliboard since the first reply I got, but uhhh…

Would any of those you tested happen to support multilingual typing? As in, detecting when you switch languages without having to tap a button? I alternate between English and Portuguese a lot and having to tap something to switch is a nuisance.

I just spent ages looking into this and the answer is… Heliboard!

Go to languages and disable the option to use the system language. Then enable, say, Portuguese. Once enabled, tap on the name of the language and there is a Multilingual option to add another language (e.g. English).

I don’t use this open so can’t speak to it’s quality, but give it a go and let me know how you get on!

CC: @EddoWagt@feddit.nl

No way, why is that so hidden? I’ll check heliboard out! Thanks for the @, really appreciate it.

Now to find a swipe typing library

Even more frustrating was how every keyboard describes themselves as “multilingual” but they just mean you can switch between different languages, not that you can use multiple at once.

Yeah it’s a totally different thing. I guess people who make the keyboards only really speak one language. It’s taken so much time to find a keyboard that actually does it. Gboard does it and I think Swiftkey used to as well, but those are not open source obviously.

I still have a bit of configuring to do for Heliboard, but I think I can get it to work for me

Well I’ll be.

I’ll test it more extensively, still, neat!

While it’s not on the main F-Droid repo, they distribute it in their own repository: https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo

No multilingual typing with FUTO though right, or did I miss something?

As far as I can tell, just the switch menu (hold space), not multilingual. I didn’t even realise it was a thing until you mentioned it (in my defence I only speak one language).

@Dave @EddoWagt they just need to add a language switch, I doubt its that hard

They have a language switch button actually if you hold the space-bar, but I need it to be without having to switch manually

Is that what multilingual is? If you hold space you can easily switch to any of the languages you added in settings. I thought multilingual was the ability to type in any of your added languages without having to toggle between them?

Yeah that’s exactly it for me, I regularly switch between Dutch and English, so having to switch with a button is a nuisance. GBoard allows me to switch without any input

@Dave its quite clunky, you don’t really switch languages more like open another instance of the keyboard, a simple language switch can fix this, I’ll prob make an issue

@EddoWagt @Dave yea that’s a deal breaker for me, I have to use multiple languages daily

But my favourite so far is FUTO Keyboard.

Note, that FUTO Keyboard is proprietary, as its code is being distributed under source-available license: https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md

OP never asked for OSS 🙂. It’s not big tech and has no network access so should suit the de-google theme.

On FUTO, they are using the term “Source First” (which they invented) because they pretty much think that OSI is funded by big tech and serves their purposes. My exaggerated paraphrasing but you can read their views here.

Basically they think the current model doesn’t work, and they are experimenting with a different take. I don’t have strong views but I’m happily using the keyboard while I wait and see if it works for them.

Futo keyboard isnt on fdroid not happy about that really hope they start publishing it there tho.

FUTO cannot decide to publish on the F-Droid main repository. The F-Droid team compiles all the apps that get published there themselves, so they decide what to publish. Well, and the F-Droid team will not publish FUTO keyboard, because it’s not open-source.

they probably won’t serve it on the official repo, because it’s not really open source. you can look up their own repository and add it to F-droid, though.

Futo is great, thumb-key is painful

FUTO keyboard managed to be very similar to OpenBoard and Heliboard, while solving some issues I had with those (buggy quirks that may well be hardware or software specific).

I used Thumb-key for a few months, to give it a real go, but I’m not convinced I ever got my speed up. Could do about 25wpm at my peak but I can do another 10wpm on a more normal keyboard (with word suggestions) and I don’t think I’m particularly fast. Not sure what’s normal for a mobile keyboard.

I have the same experience with Thumb-Key, though I keep thinking maybe I just didn’t try long enough…

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