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! 😄
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 kind of hate takes like these because its such a false equivalence. People aren’t OK with it, but the vast majority of people don’t have time to fight this battle when every single aspect of modern technology is in a constant arms race to do more and more surveillance.
It’s great there are people like you who want to promote more private alternatives, and even better that people are making more private alternatives, but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps. Until that changes it’s always going to be an uphill battle to convince people to switch, and it’s not because they’re “ok with corporate surveillance”. That isn’t even in the calculation to begin with and it’s not making any friends or building any bridges to imply that about people. You would help your cause a lot if you took a less judgemental approach to spreading the word about it.
Sorry for the soapbox, but I see this attitude on here a lot and it really misses the mark and does damage to an otherwise worthy cause (spreading the word about better software). I don’t think you mean anything bad when you say this, but I just want you to understand how it comes off to people who aren’t invested in that lifestyle.
I can understand that some people don’t want to deal with changing keyboards even if they don’t want to be tracked. But you are literally here asking about keyboards. If this is not the place to talk about this then what is? Anyone interested enough to wonder about what keyboard they use should consider their privacy as the main aspect for a keyboard, as it is an app that can see everything you write, including passwords.
but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps
This is absolutely wrong and too often repeated as a mantra, and not because they have actually good UX, but because the corporate apps have it worse even (but they set the standard so anything that isn’t like theirs is bad). From all keyboards I have tried (many, including corporate ones, closed source, etc) the closed source ones have usually the worse UX. They start better and then worsen over time. You said you like the personalisation options, but often there’s less options in any closed source corporate keyboard. It took them years for gboard to actually let users have the number row always on top. I could have that in other keyboards long before gboard. Swiftkey was wonderful, but over the years it got so bloated that it lagged when used. There’s unfortunately not a perfect keyboard, but through all the posts in this thread there were a lot of good recommendations that allow you to choose good customisability, respect of user privacy, and also fringe use cases not often supported. And in general, the worse options are the closed source ones.
The only real downside of Foss keyboards is that as they have more options they usually require a bit more set up time which puts many people off.
I’m currently using Heliboard, lots of customisability, Foss, good language support and a must for me, multi language support. So far I am making less typos than with many other keyboards. The downside is no swipe support right in the app, but you can get it to work too if interested using 3rd party libraries.
In the past I’ve been using gboard which was OK for a while but started making more and more typos and wrong corrections over time, that plus trying to degoogle myself pushed me away.
Also anysoft keyboard, pretty nice, and was quite happy with it but again started getting tired of some typos I kept making.
I am keeping an eye on futo keyboard too, which at the moment doesn’t support multi language support, maybe in the future when implemented I’ll try it.
Thank you!
I dropped gboard for privacy, switched to an open source option but struggled to get on with it .
Now typing on Futo and immediately loving it. Much appreciated.
If this is as good as it seems at first glance I’ll definitely be paying for this.
Thanks for the recommendation, I just installed it!
When every fucking app is a privacy nightmare, it can be a huge slog finding alternatives for everything. Keyboard apps were on my list but you just made it super easy.
Thanks. I’ll give it a try. I’d never found an alternative to Gboard that works as well when it comes to swipe typing, learning words missing from the dictionary, Japanese flick / handwriting input, and one-handed mode. It’ll be big if this is finally it.
Edit: works well for an alpha. UI is unexpectedly polished. Gesture typing needs to get better, there’s no one-handed mode yet and I need an option to shrink the UI a bit because right now it’s huge. I’m really impressed with it so far though. Really nice that you can customize dictionaries and action buttons and stuff. Not quite baked enough for me yet but I see huge potential. I bought the premium version to support them and will be cheering for them while staying on Gboard for now.
It’s what I use right now and it’s great in many aspects but I do still miss the graceful transition between languages that swiftkey was offering. With this I need to switch manually every time. With swiftkey I could write directly in any language and change in the same sentence and it could deal with it.
This is the first non gboard keyboard that I don’t immediately feel uncomfortable typing om
Holy shit thanks for the suggestion… I’ve been using Swift Key for years and tried other keyboard apps but none convinced me so far, so i’ve simply used Netguard to try to block Swift Key as much as possible. I’m currently typing using Futo and while I still miss some stuff (can you show the symbols on the keys as well? See screenshot). I already like it!
Looks great, but without an extended QERTZ layout I’m out. Switching from SwiftKey to HeliBoard now, since it has ÄÖÜ on there by default for a german layout.
FUTO Keyboard. Its newer. Still needs improvements to gesture typing. Overall I like 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…
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.
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.
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.
I use typewise. It feels like there is more space for every button and i no longer accidentally press the space button
A bee posted 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 😉
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).
It might be the issue. I have the same with english and danish. I have asked in the telegram group about it
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 🤔
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.
Try it for a few days. You get into it real quick and it has a lot of useful features.
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
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.
I like autocorrecting typos, I don’t like autocorrecting words into other words. As far as I’ve found you can’t have one without the other. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
No that’s correct. It cannot distinguish between typos and different words
No way to know if you meant to typo type or typo
It’s a shame. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement one that doesn’t change correctly spelled words at all.
Well SwiftKey advertised with some AI (actually just algorithm) that could analyse the words you typed before and glean from context what you are trying to say and correct accordingly. I find it’s wrong more often than not so I keep autocorrect off. Also I use SwiftKey in two languages, English and my native language, Dutch. It does not anticipate in which language it should predict at all. It mostly just favours English.
Yeah that’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want. If I wrote a word and it’s spelled correctly, I wish autocorrect would leave it alone instead of incorrectly guessing a different word. Oh well, one can dream.
If you type the wrong word, it will underline it and you can click on it, then tap on the correct auto suggested word. Very easy
Same, been using it long before it was bought by Microsoft. It has customizations I like, and (when it works properly) I can copy and paste between my phone and computer.
That sounds like a really nice feature (the copy between devices). Does it have gifs built in?
Yeah
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.
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?
It has swipe typing though
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
I’m testing with the fastest model on a OnePlus 10 Pro, and speaking 3-4 words incurs a wait time of several seconds, way longer than simply typing them out would take.
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.
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.
Yeah that’s exactly my experience, too. Nothing else I’ve tried has all the features I want.
Just switched to Futo after years and years of gboard. Its a 1:1 replacement, give it a try.
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.
I’ll give it a shot, thanks!
SwiftKey has the spacebar cursor and swipe on backspace to select whole word to delete as well now.
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’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.
Has your autocorrect been getting worse? I use swipe and it seems to be mixing up words way worse than it used to.
Or am I just getting bad at typing lol
100% been getting worse. I was just talking to a buddy about how bad SwiftKey has been getting and I want to look for an alternative.
I’m fairly certain it’s getting worse.
Does it let you have it switch themes automatically when in day/night mode?
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!
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 😅
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.
Thanks for mentioning this. As a current florisboard user I didn’t know I have so much to look forward to!
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
Very cool, I think I’ll have to check this one out. Thanks for all the replies.
I use FlorisBoard Beta with the Material You theme. It looks amazing.
FUTO Keyboard also looks very pretty, but it’s a bit bloated.