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! 😄
Heliboard, very customisable and doesn’t send all my typing to a MAGMA company’s servers.
Nice, this is the first FOSS board I see that can actually replace my SwiftKey layout. Thanks for the suggestion
Heliboard!!
(also on F-Droi & Izzy)Its amazing & completely open sauce.
Extremely configurable too, which I like (and with built in help that guides to eg where to find other libraries).
And if it helps someone - it’s the closest experience to gboard, I only use this keyboard on my devices now. Works with multiple languages at the same time too.Tho for gesture typing I did load Googles library (still offline).
This seems to be the winner across all the comments so far. How does it do with the correcting words to other words thing I mentioned?
Yeah, I don’t understand what you meant by that - if I understood correctly it’s the matter of sometimes autocorrect working as intended and sometimes not? Afaik that is just how it works.
Or if you meant correcting grammar (or sentence prediction?) vs correcting just the spelling … I’m not familiar of any keyboards have that distinction.
(Never had this issue, including on Heli)I have never used autocorrect, not even in T9 days.
I always use gesture typing with alternative words shown I can select if I want.
I have autocorrect set much the same way, to display alternatives I can select or just continue.I like to misspell words for cumedic effuckt so autocockerrect wouldn’t work anyway.
But basically with any keyboard you can set it to remember new words (with Heli either within app or in the phones personal dictionary). I have it that if I write something 3 times it automatically goes to the dictionary.
I used Swiftkey until I noticed that Microsoft is adding weird shit to it and so I deleted it and now I just use the built-in Samsung keyboard because none of the others will be any better.
I’ve been using SwiftKey since like, 2012?
I just like the custom keyboards, and it learns my mistakes when I swipe. I always carry 2 phones, so I was able to sync the 2nd phone so my swipes are already learned on that phone.
Also, there’s a snow keyboard that collect snow at the bottom of the screen as you swipe.
Has your autocorrect been getting worse? I use swipe and it seems to be mixing up words way worse than it used to.
Or am I just getting bad at typing lol
100% been getting worse. I was just talking to a buddy about how bad SwiftKey has been getting and I want to look for an alternative.
I’m fairly certain it’s getting worse.
Heliboard.
Privacy.
OpenBoard Fork with gesture typing
I use Fleksy, probably not as popular because it doesn’t have swype typing but I find the autocorrect works really well, and it’s easy to change the word if you don’t like what it corrected to by swiping up or down to different options, and you can swipe left to delete words. Built in gif support too, and there’s an extension to make the number row always show.
Nice! That sounds pretty great (I don’t use swipe typing at all so no loss there). When you delete a word from correction, is it only deleting it in that exact situation (our to out), or is it deleting out from the dictionary entirely? Hoping it’s the former and that might be exactly what I’m looking for if so.
Sorry, to clarify, swiping left is like backspace a word, if I swiped after now it’d delete “now”, then “after” if I did it again. If you typed our and it changed to out, you could swipe up and it’d revert back to our.
You can add or remove words from the dictionary by opening the app separately too, but most settings are accessed from the keyboard.
Thank you for this (repeated) question! I will try some of these and collate my experiences.
- SwiftKey
Long-time fan, in spite of privacy concerns. My bar for comparing everything below.
- FUTO
First install, looks promising.
Indeed very customisable. What I don’t like is the (imho) far inferior swipe typing and the need to explicitly switch languages for the keyboard to use the appropriate dictionary. Also, I miss directional buttons for those single-character position adjustments (Futo only offers space-key swiping). Voice typing seems highlighted but I find it to be unbearably slow.
Verdict: will most likely uninstall again.
- OpenBoard
Installation somehow defaulted to “English (Australia)”, but no biggie.
Seems very customisable also, but lacks swipe typing (a deal beaker for me). Relies on the OS language (actually, keyboard) switcher and curiously lacks a shortcut to its settings (requiring the user to go so the rest through the Settings app (which, best-case, is a whopping 5 taps).
Verdict: privacy aside, cannot compete with SwiftKey for features and usability.
- Florisboard
Strainghtforward installation. Seems extremely customisable. No swiping nor autocomplete but both festures are clearly promised for a future release.
Verdict: apart from features promised in the future, thus seems an excellent keyboard.
- Heliboard
Straightforward installation. Language selection included a github redirect to manually download dictionary, which was semi nice.
Proper big-keyed numerical keyboard. Also extremely customisable. Space-key swiping even supports vertical movement.
Verdict: apart from lack of swipe typing, probably the best contender!
- Graffiti
Included because I friggin’ loved it back in the day. The (to my knowledge) only app offering graffiti input is badly broken and crashes immediately on modern Android versions. I remember it working quite well on earlier versions, but that was years ago.
What do you think about this? Seems great to me
This seems to be the same version as the OpenBoard through the Play store, so… same?
Futo voice to text works nice and fast on my pixel 8 pro. Fractions of a second slower than google. Also that’s with the slower English 74 library (more data point, slower). They have an even larger one but the default is the smaller and faster English-39 model
Ill be the lone user of Anysoft in this thread. Its on F-Droid and the playstore. Open source. Came from gboard, but realized that during all of the states banning porn thing I don’t want google to know everything I type.
Its customizable and a good replacement for gboard IMO. It was a slight learning curve to be slightly more precise with my typing. Gboard you can just randomly mash and google seems to know what you’re going for. I also found the autocorrect to be worse until I added enough of my own slang into the dictionary, but now its fantastic.
Mostly Thumb Key, but I’m trying out Heliboard right now thanks to the recommendations here and it’s pretty nice. I haven’t used a good swiping keyboard for a while.
I haven’t heard of that one (thumb key). What’s it’s claim to fame?
It has the letters in a grid! It’s unintuitive at first, but one you get used to it it’s pretty quick.
Cool I’ll take a look. Thanks!
I use anysoft keyboard cause I thought that it was the only foss option at the time and got used to it.
I guess you must like it then?
no. 😁
Lmao nice
My keyboard autocorrected this into thus once
I’m using the default samsung one, don’t know the name
Gboard but with network permissions turned off. Works great. Haven’t had any issues with an autosuggest and swiping. I don’t use autocorrect.
I’m surprised to hear that it doesn’t get angry at you!
Probably ignores the setting
It’s not a setting, it’s a permission. Android will just not allow an app to connect to the internet if it doesn’t have that permission.
On regular Android you can’t disable this one though, but on GrapheneOS for example you can.
Android and gboard both made by Google. I suspect there are exceptions to any system setting. What with google being evil… Sorry i mean, what with the “one rogue engineer” at google who creates so many google agreeable faux pas.
i used to use touchpal, because I liked that I could swipe up on a key to get the upper case version of the letter, or swipe in other directions to get other variants.
They enshittifies the product a few years back by inserting ads into every app i was using.
These days i just use the android default, but I miss the functionality touchpal had.
Software is in such a sad place these days. Everything is in a constant state of decay it feels like.
Multiling-o keyboard might fit the bill.
