Ask Lemmy

I love Heliboard it is a fork from Openboard. It has themes and is 100% offline

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'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.

FUTO Keyboard. Its newer. Still needs improvements to gesture typing. Overall I like it.

I use typewise. It feels like there is more space for every button and i no longer accidentally press the space button

Heliboard, very customisable and doesn't send all my typing to a MAGMA company's servers.

Did you know you can turn off autocorrect?

I've been using Swype since its inception and I've stuck with it after it was called SwiftKey and still use it now it's owned by Microsoft.

Gboard is okay enough but I've gotten more used to SwiftKey.

Thumb-Key

It took a few weeks to get used to it and a few more to get comfortable, but now I don't think I can go back. Before when I messed up, I would keep repeating the mistake until I was forced to slow down. Now I can get 40-50 WPM when I try.

I do miss some things but they really aren't deal breakers:

• Clipboard History
• Emoji Search
• Autofill Integration

I love thumb-key with the two-hands symbols and numbers layout

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.

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. Yes, I hate it being from Microsoft. But has most of the pros already mentioned in this thread and a some important features (for me) that I haven't found with other keyboard:

I text a lot in Spanish, Portuguese and English; sometimes in French. I can use any of those languages with any preferred layout (qwerty, azerty) or as I do, Spanish layout as a base but from there, I get all characters needed to write properly such as ñ, ç, æ, ê.

Prediction is outstanding, I can start a phrase in one language and continue with other and still get very accurate suggestions. It has been my default keyboard long before Microsoft acquired the company and, for now, big corporate enshittification has been slow. En conclusión y para sumarizar: j'aime bien le SwiftKey clavier, ele tem funções que nenhum outro tem.

I'm using Heliboard a few months ago, I prefer privacy over personalization

OpenBoard. Has what I need in terms of customization and I can turn off word prediction/correction (not sure if it even has it to begin with). Used to use Swiftkey several years ago but i like OpenBoard more nowadays.

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.

I use Gboard. I really want to like the FUTO keyboard, but it unfortunately sucks for typing. Not sure what magic secret sauce Gboard has, but with the FUTO keyboard I basically mistype almost every word. Maybe Gboard has some tap target corrections or something? I've tried pushing through with the FUTO keyboard for about a month, but I think I'm ready to uninstall it. )`:

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.

Currently, I just use GBoard, but I'm following the development of Florisboard rather closely.

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).

AnySoftKeyboard.

It has a various styles, and a neat way of switching languages and their layouts.

I use FlorisBoard Beta with the Material You theme. It looks amazing.

FUTO Keyboard also looks very pretty, but it's a bit bloated.

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"

8vim

it's not easy!

I fucking hate Gboard spelling correct feature, it's completely useless. I often ended up google the word (ironic isn't it) to get the correct spelling.

A little context, English is not my native language so sometimes I got trouble spelling some words. For example the other day, I couldn't remember how to spell "aesthetic", I did type in "asthetic" along with a few other variation, but all I got from the "suggestions bar" was "authentic" "asthenic" "asthma" "asthenia".

So I gave up and type "asthetic" in Google and it knew immediately and correct it to "aesthetic".

OpenBoard. 100% foss. You can find it in F-Droid

FUTO FTW