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
Too bad it doesn’t support pasting image urls as images.
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.
FUTO Keyboard. Its newer. Still needs improvements to gesture typing. Overall I like it.
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.
Does it have the features I called out that I like about Gboard?
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.
Fleksy has gif support built-in. It’s the only one outside of Gboard and SwiftKey that does afaik
Samsung does, and lots of others. But IMHO, they get pretty sketchy pretty quickly. Ginger has 12 known trackers, Bobble AI has 8, GO has 17, etc.
I’d be happy to pay for one if it was good enough.
Oh, I meant free as in not proprietary. Free as in freedom.
I remember hearing about Fleksy keyboard years ago, although I can’t really attest to it. It seems to have far fewer trackers than most proprietary keyboards, and just for analytics. Most other keyboards you find will send your data to advertisers or worse.
So far, most of the ones suggested here are free and private, meaning that they belong to the community and not to a company, and they do not collect or sell your data. That may be a factor for you or it may not, but I think a lot of people on Lemmy tend to care about 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
How would you like to switch between them? I use 3 regularly with different layouts and I’ve never had an issue. For me, a keyboard swipe is quicker than a long press and tap to select, or a tap on a single button. It could be any of the above. You can also have the switching button in the top menu or by the space bar.
Is there a better switching method for you?
‘Keyboard swipe’? Wdym? I think i might have missed something…
Sorry, swiping right or left on the spacebar in this case.
It doesnt seem to work for me. Is there a toggle in the settings maybe? Didnt find any…
Arte Romaji Input (Japanese)
screen recording
https://files.korako.me/video/nyuryoku.mp4Similar to Godan, but I prefer this one.
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.
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 appreciate the negative reviews too. Thanks!
FlorisBoard Beta. Works and gets the job done. Also has a nice UI.
I want to like futo but I think it just needs more time. I’m using Gboard without the Internet access turned on (I’m using graphene OS) so I’m not worried about Google knowing anything I type.
I mostly use the swipe to text feature and I just haven’t found another keyboard that does it better than Gboard (unfortunately)
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.
I like correction of typos and prediction, I just don’t like correcting words into other words. I haven’t found a way to have one without the other. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Try Heliboard
It is a fork of openboard. Openboard is basically dead
SwiftKey for swipe texting
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
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.
Cool thanks for the detailed response. I don’t use swipe typing at all so that one doesn’t matter to me. Gif support on Gboard is you can press a GIF button and it lets you search and insert gifs from giphy. I like funny pictures, what can I say. 😄
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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 😅
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”.
Yeah it’s horrible. Then I turn it off and realize that it’s somehow even worse without it.
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.
The Samsung keyboard definitely looks better but underperforms both gboard & SwiftKey when it comes to swipe typing, auto correction and spelling. I very much wish it was the best because I’m getting tired of the other two trying to force AI features on their keyboards.
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.
