I came across everyday topic on Techlore Discussions about free and open source keyboards for Android and discovered this little gem. It is FlorisBoard, a virtual keyboard for Android which respects privacy of the user. I can sigh with relief and finish my search for that singular keyboard for typing stuff on the go.
It has everything I need and more.
- Multilanguage support: detailed layout options, popular presets
- Swift and glide typing experience
- Customizable gestures: switch language by fast swiping the keyboard itself left and right, change case by swiping up, the infamous cursor swipe on space bar
- Emojis
- Clipboard
- Smartbar: quick actions and clipboard cursor tools
- One-handed mode
- Other look-and-feel settings
Oh neat. Development had died down, but looks like it’s picking back up again and the creator is finding more maintainers. It’s what I use on my phone.
Here, the developer explained why development activity decreased:
While it is true that due to private reasons I had to take a bit of a pause of developing FlorisBoard and some time passed with no progress at all, implementing a completely new statistical NLP (Natural Language Processing) provider, or in laymans terms the long-awaited word prediction and spell-checking implementation, is also a huge task which takes a lot of time and trial-error and development time.
Yeah I had given up on the project and had settled on OpenBoard for now, but if/when the word suggestions ever land, I’ll gladly jump over. I don’t dislike OpenBoard per se, it’s actually pretty decent, reminds me of older AOSP when it was a bit more naive, but I really miss swipe typing.
You should give AnySoftKeyboard a spin. Has word suggestions that are really good and the swiping works really well too
https://github.com/Helium314/openboard/releases
Openboard fork with swipe typing
