I use Gboard.
The main things I like about it are:
- Very customizable (I like having number row always visible, and having long press for symbols on each letter).
- Has gif support built in.
My biggest pain point is:
- It auto corrects words that are spelled correctly to other words. I type “our” and it changes to “out”, I recently typed “purpose” and it changed it to “purple”. Autocorrect is awesome and necessary, but I hate that it corrects words to other words and not just typos. I wish I could find a keyboard that has the things I like without this annoyance.
Am I looking for a unicorn? Let me know! 😄
I love Heliboard it is a fork from Openboard. It has themes and is 100% offline
It’s there a better swiping library for heliboard? The one they suggest is a lot worse than gboard’s.
That’s odd, it should be identical. The library linked in their FAQ is a package extracted from Google apps.
Haven’t used heliboard so I’m not sure if its different but have you tried this one?
It’s insanely customizable; you can change all of the special characters to be anything else, as well as their positions.
Nice. That’s actually even more customizable than I need. How does it do with the correcting correctly spelled words thing?
The amount of people on here that are okay with a corporation phoning home everything you type is a bit scary. Googles Gboard and Microsoft’s SwiftKey are a privacy nightmare. Check out FUTO: https://keyboard.futo.org/
- always offline
- voice input
- swipe typing
- predictive text
- auto correct
- personalization
I kind of hate takes like these because its such a false equivalence. People aren’t OK with it, but the vast majority of people don’t have time to fight this battle when every single aspect of modern technology is in a constant arms race to do more and more surveillance.
It’s great there are people like you who want to promote more private alternatives, and even better that people are making more private alternatives, but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps. Until that changes it’s always going to be an uphill battle to convince people to switch, and it’s not because they’re “ok with corporate surveillance”. That isn’t even in the calculation to begin with and it’s not making any friends or building any bridges to imply that about people. You would help your cause a lot if you took a less judgemental approach to spreading the word about it.
Sorry for the soapbox, but I see this attitude on here a lot and it really misses the mark and does damage to an otherwise worthy cause (spreading the word about better software). I don’t think you mean anything bad when you say this, but I just want you to understand how it comes off to people who aren’t invested in that lifestyle.
I can understand that some people don’t want to deal with changing keyboards even if they don’t want to be tracked. But you are literally here asking about keyboards. If this is not the place to talk about this then what is? Anyone interested enough to wonder about what keyboard they use should consider their privacy as the main aspect for a keyboard, as it is an app that can see everything you write, including passwords.
but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps
This is absolutely wrong and too often repeated as a mantra, and not because they have actually good UX, but because the corporate apps have it worse even (but they set the standard so anything that isn’t like theirs is bad). From all keyboards I have tried (many, including corporate ones, closed source, etc) the closed source ones have usually the worse UX. They start better and then worsen over time. You said you like the personalisation options, but often there’s less options in any closed source corporate keyboard. It took them years for gboard to actually let users have the number row always on top. I could have that in other keyboards long before gboard. Swiftkey was wonderful, but over the years it got so bloated that it lagged when used. There’s unfortunately not a perfect keyboard, but through all the posts in this thread there were a lot of good recommendations that allow you to choose good customisability, respect of user privacy, and also fringe use cases not often supported. And in general, the worse options are the closed source ones.
The only real downside of Foss keyboards is that as they have more options they usually require a bit more set up time which puts many people off.
I’m currently using Heliboard, lots of customisability, Foss, good language support and a must for me, multi language support. So far I am making less typos than with many other keyboards. The downside is no swipe support right in the app, but you can get it to work too if interested using 3rd party libraries.
In the past I’ve been using gboard which was OK for a while but started making more and more typos and wrong corrections over time, that plus trying to degoogle myself pushed me away.
Also anysoft keyboard, pretty nice, and was quite happy with it but again started getting tired of some typos I kept making.
I am keeping an eye on futo keyboard too, which at the moment doesn’t support multi language support, maybe in the future when implemented I’ll try it.
Thanks. I’ll give it a try. I’d never found an alternative to Gboard that works as well when it comes to swipe typing, learning words missing from the dictionary, Japanese flick / handwriting input, and one-handed mode. It’ll be big if this is finally it.
Edit: works well for an alpha. UI is unexpectedly polished. Gesture typing needs to get better, there’s no one-handed mode yet and I need an option to shrink the UI a bit because right now it’s huge. I’m really impressed with it so far though. Really nice that you can customize dictionaries and action buttons and stuff. Not quite baked enough for me yet but I see huge potential. I bought the premium version to support them and will be cheering for them while staying on Gboard for now.
It’s what I use right now and it’s great in many aspects but I do still miss the graceful transition between languages that swiftkey was offering. With this I need to switch manually every time. With swiftkey I could write directly in any language and change in the same sentence and it could deal with it.
Holy shit thanks for the suggestion… I’ve been using Swift Key for years and tried other keyboard apps but none convinced me so far, so i’ve simply used Netguard to try to block Swift Key as much as possible. I’m currently typing using Futo and while I still miss some stuff (can you show the symbols on the keys as well? See screenshot). I already like it!
I’ve recently replaced Gboard with Heliboard. The three main things I want in an Android keyboard are as follows:
- Word suggestions when typing.
- Glide typing.
- Not being super creepy about my data.
Hwliboard does all those things and is super customisable as well.
I’ve seen a few people mention this one so far. How does it stack up against my wants and dislike?
I don’t use the gif keyboard or autocomplete, so I comment about that. but it’s so much more customizable than gboard. Honestly surprised you found gboard to be customizable because in my experience it’s one of the least customizable ones out there.
FUTO Keyboard. Its newer. Still needs improvements to gesture typing. Overall I like it.
The only thing I’m missing is the ability to use multiple languages at once.
It’s pretty easy to switch, es posible cambiar con una toca. You can map it to a long press or swipe or use a dedicated key.
I have 4 languages i need to constantly switch between. It becomes frustrating after a while
I’ve heard people say that the gesture typing is not great, but I’ve never had an issue.At least not more than any other keyboard.
For me, the voice typing is literally the best I’ve ever used.
I don’t think there is a free and private keyboard that has gifs, stickers, etc. but I do like the way FUTO handles emoji.
I don’t think there is a free/private keyboard with gifs or stickers. There’s gboard, SwiftKey, Samsung keyboard, and increasingly sketchy keyboards from there on down.
I use typewise. It feels like there is more space for every button and i no longer accidentally press the space button
Next to f and h
It takes some getting used to but i am pretty happy with it! You swipe up on the buttons for capitals and it has some gestures that makes deleting and restoring quite easy
Interesting. Admittedly, I’m almost always using my phone one-handed, but I know some people use two hands.
The keyboard itself is great, I just feel like the auto correction keeps doing everything in it’s power to fuck up what I typed, more so than before I switched.
Do you use multiple languages? And if ye. Do you have a pro/paid version that switches between languages automatically?
Wow this one is wild. I kind of like it at a glance but also I would have to relearn to type 🤔
Its not that difficult actually! They even have a mini game and a very good tutorial in the app!
I feel that its gotten a lot easier to type since i got this and a lot less typos
