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
Does it have the things I called out as liking about Gboard?
- Customizable, yes
- Gif, no
Got it, thanks!
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?
I had the same dilemma. Switched to HB and added in FUTO voice to replace Googles voice to text. SO doesn’t like that it doesn’t learn like Swiftkey does, but I like it because you can set it’s aggressiveness of the autocorrect.
I’ll have to check this one out I think. Lots of people in here recommending it. I’m guessing it’s not on Google play?
I install directly from the developer’s GitHub using Obtainium. However F-Droid is probably the more common method.
Is Fdroid like a third party app store app or something? I see people talk about it a lot on here but I don’t know what it is.
How do you change the positions of letters and characters?
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.
Maybe it’s an old package? The quality is noticeably worse.
I don’t use swiping, I have no clue 😅
Haven’t used heliboard so I’m not sure if its different but have you tried this one?
AnySoftKeyboard.
It has a various styles, and a neat way of switching languages and their layouts.
Does it have the features I called out that I like about Gboard?
It’s customizable, though you can’t, say, arbitrary drag keyboard keys around on an Android device. There are add-on layouts, and it’s possible to create those.
I don’t know what “GIF” support involves. It has some support for various Unicode emojis. If this is some sort of Android-native rich text field functionality to embed arbitrary image files, not that I’m aware of, but I may also just not use any apps that support it…I think all the apps I use may just edit regular text.
It does not support swiping, something that I don’t use but which some people do rely on.
The two most-significant things that it doesn’t do that I would like:
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It does not have the ability to attach arbitrary macro text strings to a key (well, absent from creating a new keyboard, I suppose), something that I have wanted.
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It doesn’t support the “drag on spacebar to move cursor in a text field” functionality that some Android software keyboards have.
Of the open-source keyboards, it’s the one that I find the best.
I believe – not in front of my device – that you can adjust the aggressiveness of text correction or disable it.
You can set it up to keep numbers visible.
I just don’t like correcting words into other words.
So, the normal way to deal with this – I don’t remember whether Gboard supports this, but I suspect it does, and Anysoft definitely does – is that autocorrecting keyboards don’t correct a word that they recognize as a word into another word. The thing is that they won’t recognize every word out there. So what you do is to create a “user dictionary”, and add your word to it. Then the keyboard knows that your brand name or technical term or whatever is a real word. With Anysoft, you see a list of corrections immediately above the keyboard, and you can tap on the word in its uncorrected form to add it to the user dictionary. You can go into the keyboard settings to view and delete or edit terms in the user dictionary. I don’t know about Gboard, whether this is an Android-wide convention or not, but with Anysoft, if you hit space after a word and get an unwanted correction, you can, before hitting any other keys, hit backspace and it’ll delete the space and revert the correction; you can then tap space again and continue with the uncorrected word, if you only want a single uncorrected word and don’t want to add it to your user dictionary.
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I guess it ticks quite differently than gboard (which I don’t use). It is very customizable, even with add on modules.
I don’t use many of the options, though. I don’t like long press. No idea what you mean with GIF support.
The autocorrect usually asks whether I accept the correction or not.
Cool thanks for the response. Gif support is a button that lets you search and insert gifs from giphy. I use it a lot because I like memes 😅
Currently, I just use GBoard, but I’m following the development of Florisboard rather closely.
I just installed the floris 4.0 beta earlier. I think once they ship 4.0 and offer a type-ahead suggestion model Floris’ll be worth considering as a serious Gboard replacement.
So far Floris is the best Gboard replacement candidate I’ve found.
I use typewise. It feels like there is more space for every button and i no longer accidentally press the space button
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?
Yes to both (English/German).
I absolutely adore this keyboard, I just wish they’d add a voice input button so I could use FUTO’s voice to text with it.
Wow this one is wild. I kind of like it at a glance but also I would have to relearn to type 🤔
Try it for a few days. You get into it real quick and it has a lot of useful features.
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
The less typos thing seems like it would be true even at a glance. That was my first thought seeing this.
I don’t know how you would… Where is it!?
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.
You dont need to press both space buttons simultaneously to add a space 😉
A bee posted this
FUTO FTW
Gboard is pretty good. I switched off Swiftkey because Gboard has the lil space bar cursor thing. Swipe typing is pretty great, and the predictions are fine.
I would prefer a non-Google keyboard, but I haven’t found one that’s easy to install and works the way I want it to.
SwiftKey has the spacebar cursor and swipe on backspace to select whole word to delete as well now.
Just switched to Futo after years and years of gboard. Its a 1:1 replacement, give it a try.
I’ll give it a shot, thanks!
Not exactly 1:1. The main thing that I still miss is multi lingual typing. It’s not too big a deal to just switch the languages when I need to, especially since I only use 2. But that’s still more than I needed to do with Gboard or Heliboard.
Yeah that’s exactly my experience, too. Nothing else I’ve tried has all the features I want.
Unexpected Keyboard
https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard
Available on F-Droid
You can pretty much configure the whole layout. Not sure about gif support though.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.
Maybe customizable is the wrong word, but I like the way I have it setup and I’ve found some other keyboards can’t replicate it.
It’s there a better swiping library for heliboard? The one they suggest is a lot worse than gboard’s.
When you type our and it corrects to out, I guess it displays it in the middle of the word row, press “out” and hold it and drag it to the trashcan that appears above to “remove suggestion”
Definitely never knew about this. Does that only remove for that exact situation (our into out)? I would be afraid I’m removing out from the dictionary entirely.
It does not remove from dictionary, just for this suggestion/situation
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.
Heliboard.
Privacy.
SwiftKey for swipe texting
Gboard. I want handwriting for Chinese and afaik no foss keyboard has that.
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.
