I’ve tried a few keyboards over the years, and the only one that I actually liked was actual malicious adware.
Looking forward to seeing good suggestions in this thread.
Definitely recommend Heliboard.
I’ve been following Google’s material 3 since its release. There’s pretty good examples of it, like the calculator app, but half of google’s own apps don’t follow their own guidelines, and they keep making changes to stray away and make their designs even uglier. Gboard was one of the final hopes for google’s design. this better be a bug or something
Has anyone noticed gboard randomly closes now on Pixel 9? Can’t find info about this issue anywhere.
I switched to Heliboard and I couldn’t be more happier! It is just as good as any proprietary keyboards.
Don’t use gboard, rather download a keyboard from F-Droid and avoid the keylogging :-)
Which one do you use? I haven’t found one that works as well as the Google one yet
FUTO keyboard, Seriously, it’s way better than every other option I’ve looked into. Has material you design support.
Also a lot of cool in development features like on-device text correction and speech to text with local LLM processing.
Futo is great unless you constantly switch between several languages. 🥲
idk 2 klicks to switch a language works well enough for me with futo.
I like the 0 tap approach of gboard, I can switch between English and French within the same sentence (known as frenglish)
HeliBoard is pretty nice
Simple keyboard. I went minimalistic
I’ve been using FUTO which is free and open source, has pretty good gesture typing, very good voice to text, and does not connect to the internet. I’m happy with it, but I’m also an idiot and most things make me happy.
Edit: I am wrong about freedom and open source. Don’t listen to me. I still like the keyboard though.
FUTO which is free and open source
It is neither free (as in freedom), nor open source.
It is source-available.
I stand corrected.
For the love of Christ how do I change the FUTO dictionary to recognize curse words?? It’s so unnecessarily puritan
Just open the main settings and there’s a category called personal dictionary.
I’ve had a bunch of curse words in there for months but they refuse to show up in swiping or predictive text
Circles are the worst possible shape in terms of making efficient use of the limited screen space available on a phone. The screen is rectangular and nearly everything we display falls into rectangular arrangements. Using circles just means there is less room on each key to show useful information, like the long-hold functions.
I’m not opposed to change, but change entirely for the sake of change usually produces bad results.
I’m right there with you. I hate the current trend of rounded corners on everything. I know designers say it is more aesthetically pleasing, but to me it just looks like wasted space.
Depending on what you’re looking at, the goal is rarely to have stuff crammed into every pixel of the screen, at least on products that are well designed
I know that’s rarely the goal, but maybe it should be more of the goal. Sick of every app and webpage having these yawning chasms of useless white space
I use GBoard (yeah I know, it’s just really good, but yes I am aware of the privacy concerns), but I use it without shapes. The letters and hold-characters are just… there, placed around in a qwerty arrangement. No “buttons”, so to say. I hope they don’t remove that functionality.
Late-stage tech bros, devoid of innovation and flailing at their precious cup game.
I’m so over this garbage. RIP smartphones.
The fuck? If you’re gonna change the shape of the keys, at least make them hexagons. Because as we all know, hexagons are the bestagons.
Now show us your browser history.
Lots of Stand-up Mathematician?
Also then the clickable area would be bigger reducing errors. I tried a keyboard that did this once. Was a rough transition, but I managed. Unfortunately I ended up going back since it was lacking some other features.
Heliboard is the best right now
It really is. Funny enough, I use the rounded style icons.
Is it better than FUTO?
I’m really enjoying FUTO.
I wish there were a different gesture typing library to use… It makes so many annoying incorrect predictions.
idk I prefer florisboard more in general
but currently they don’t have any autocorrect or swipe typing
I hadn’t heard of this one before; but a search of the play store is giving zero results. This one require side-loading?
You can install it with fdroid.
FUTO keyboard. Try it. Say bye to gboard.
I periodically try FUTO. It’s a great keyboard, except for its swiping support. That seems to be gradually improving, but it isn’t quite there yet. Unfortunately that is how I do all my typing, so I keep going back to GBoard. I look forward to leaving it for good.
Ahh. I only use it occasionally. I’m bad at spelling and need the word predictions too much.
No mandarin unfortunately
We didn’t ask for the red to pink colour fade on the Youtube playbar either but here we are…
HOLY SHIT. Thank you. That’s what that is. I thought my screen was wonky or my eyesight was failing. It’s not even really linear, it just looks like the last 3cm of the bar are pink
Huh, TIL that’s baked into YouTube. I thought maybe sponsorblock was doing it.
I thought that as well at first, but it was in every video
Good time for FOSS keyboard apps to get some more love
Heliboard and Futo were the recommendations from what I remember?
Futo has been my favorite so far compared to other keyboards. I haven’t used Heliboard yet, but it also looks like a good option.
Futo works really nice! Glide is pretty decent, though not as good as gboard’s. Wish it had custom background images though…
I use the futo keyboard as well, but autocorrect and swiping is not good at all. correctly spelt words constantly gets changed for me, clipboard doesn’t see what I copy too many times and swiping inaccuracy is too frequent.
only reason I put up with it is for the futo microphone. mic app is in a league of it’s own
Oh man, is that the issue with my clipboard? It has been driving me NUTS. The other issues are true, but I can live with them. I’ve really been enjoying FUTO though, so I’m not sure I want to give it up.
yeah, I quickly switch to another keyboard when I need to see what’s in the keyboard so I can paste it lol.
I’m not giving up either FUTO product though
I had the same problem, but I found that turning up the advanced Parameter Values in the Text Prediction settings helps to keep everything spelled correctly. I’m currently at 10.4 for the transformer strength and 8.3 for the autocorrect threshold and I’m noticing a lot less issues… I haven’t tested out turning it up all the way yet.
I also have the Transformer fine tuning enabled.
The swipe feature definitely needs some attention.
They do have a crowdsourced way of helping to improve their swipe prediction, more info on the link here: https://swipe.futo.org/
You’ll notice that even the swipe prediction for Heliboard comes from a closed source library.
I’ll take a look at this tonight, thanks buddy
Damn imma have to save this comment
The voice transcription is just OpenAI whisper but yeah it’s pretty great. I used it to write this.
its just OpenAI whisper that runs locally on my device, as god intended lol
I haven’t had any of those issues. Out of curiosity, what version of futo keyboard are you running?
v0.1.24.1-playstore
I made some changes as another poster suggested, doesnt look like it has made any differences yet though
Heliboard is basically the same, but has the ability to add glide. Plus suggestions/corrections are already implemented, so I prefer it over Floris (which I used for months before finding heliboard)
Currently using Traditional T9 from F-Droid. Works well.
Even has a decent emoji picker, which is good. 👌 (However, i say that and couldn’t find the OK symbol…)But for a full board: Heliboard is my go-to.
Oh that’s cool, does your device have hardware keys then?
No, Traditional T9 has a virtual keyboard as well.
OpenBoard still works well for me. Including swiping and auto correct.
OpenBoard hasn’t been updated for the last 3 years. HeliBoard is a continuation of the OpenBoard development, I highly recommend it.
Looks awful
I like this. But this should be an option.
All I want is for gboard to stop hijacking my default keyboard. I set futo for a reason and I meant it.
You could just uninstall it.
wrong
Edit: just noticed it also keeps turning on background mobile data usage dispite me having explicitly disabled that.
Can’t you still remove this stuff via ADB?
Yes, but you shouldn’t.
After a reboot, a lot of phones can only use the device’s default keyboard app for entering the unlock pin/password.
If you’ve removed or disabled it, you can get into a situation where you have no keyboard at all, and a delightful chicken-and-egg situation of needing a keyboard you don’t have until after unlocking the device to enter the code to unlock the device.
(A USB keyboard will let you escape this, for what that’s worth)
yes, you can. I think it was these 2 lines ☞
adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.touchtype.swiftkey
adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.swiftkey.swiftkeyconfigurator
@CubitOom@infosec.pub
Thank you, I will try
That’s weird. What phone and OS? I’ve had to explicitly install it on my phones for as long as I can remember: https://i.imgur.com/8MlcpuK.png
Maybe you have to disable it as a keyboard in settings first?
This is a pixel 8 running stock android 15. There is no option to disable unlike other preinstalled apps.
