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! 😄
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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
Multiling-o keyboard might fit the bill.
My keyboard autocorrected this into thus once
I’m using the default samsung one, don’t know the name
OpenBoard. 100% foss. You can find it in F-Droid
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.
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.
Gboard. I want handwriting for Chinese and afaik no foss keyboard has that.
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.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 have been using Thumb Key for a few months and while I generally like it, I have not been able to figure out how to remove things like the voice typing, pasting, and undo shortcuts. Every so often I accidentally hit undo while typing, which just erases my whole message irrecoverably since my other thumb hit the next key right after. I wish I could remove all those swipe controls on the side altogether since I never use them.
I love this too! However I switched to FlickBoard, which employs the same concept but has more features. For example, I can put the number keys left to the letters. I encourage you to give it a try!
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/se.nullable.flickboard
I actually did try it! Though I don’t use numbers enough to justify the smaller hitboxes for the letters so I went back.
Just installed it and am finding it very slow going so far. Why are all the letters randomly placed?
It’s not random! The placement is based on letter frequency.
So not a pattern an actual person can spot, whilst not being totally random.
Yeah you can’t really “infer” where a letter is, it just takes time to learn the loiations by heart. I think I have used this for 6 months or so, and I’m able to write 40wpm without looking at the keyboard. But damn was it slow in beginning
It’s a pattern that will feel more natural the more you use it
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 😅
