So, up front, I’ll admit I’m one of those guys that gets hung up on tiny, largely irrelevant quirks in apps. Yeah, I’m great fun at parties.
So, what’s your favourite keyboard app? I keep coming back to SwiftKey. I feel like it’s the best typing experience for me, with fairly accurate prediction and correction — although it’s far from perfect, of course. I’ve seen plenty of people complain about it, and apart from Microsoft adding Bing to it, it’s not received much in the way of innovation or useful updates since they bought it.
I particularly like that a long press on the backspace key will delete one whole word at a time, speeding up the longer you hold it down. I simply haven’t found the backspace methods on Gboard or the Samsung keyboard (which used to be Swype I guess?) to be as predictable or reliable. Gboard’s swipe back doesn’t feel predictable in what it will do, and Samsung’s backspace is more like iOS.
I also find SwiftKey to be the best at remembering sequences of words; if I start typing my address, it’ll generally remember each successive word and offer it as the main prediction on the top row. Samsung and Gboard both do that to some extent, but I just haven’t found them to be as reliably predictable in the results.
On the other hand, I hate that SwiftKey doesn’t can’t add an image to its clipboard. Copying and pasting images is a breeze with both Gboard and Samsung’s keyboard, but with SwiftKey I pretty much have to download/screengrab and upload any image I want to insert in a chat or post.
So, that’s it. Rant over! What’s your favourite keyboard app, and does anything irritate you about it?
I use Gboard because it just works. I would like to move to a FOSS keyboard but every one I’ve tried become frustrating to use.
If you just want to distance yourself from Google, give OpenBoard a try. It’s GBoard without the G. It’s been working just the same for me, except for some reason it spontaneously decided to stop automatically capitalizing “I”.
There’s a fork of OpenBoard that enables Glide typing, in case you’re in interested in that:
I’ve tried every FOSS keyboard out there, about a year ago or so. I’m back to Gboard.
I currently use gboard with network permissions toggled off. You can do this on Graphene and Calyx or install a firewall app like NetGuard.
I’m on AnySoft, but it’s not perfect, and I gotta say that the onscreen keyboard situation for Android was one of my biggest unexpected disappointments when moving to the platform. What I’d expected was that there’d be one FOSS keyboard that would be incredibly configurable and take over, but everything seems to significantly lack in some ways:
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Some keyboards aren’t great when it comes to arrow keys/control keys/other keys useful in Termux or ConnectBot to Linux systems.
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Lack of keyboards that provide a straightforward way for users to create their own bindings. The ability to resize and relocate keys and to assign tap/hold/swipe bindings to individual keys seems like it’d be straightforward to me, but it doesn’t seem to be a thing. I mean, why can’t I remove a key that I don’t use or want (say, the “mic” key if I don’t use that functionality) and add my own key. Even better, my own modifier keys a la Shift to add more functionality to the other keys?
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Some keyboards don’t have typo correction. My accuracy on onscreen keyboards on a phone-size screen isn’t good enough for me to really operate without that. I really wish that typo correction was an external program that the keyboard program could just plug into, so that this gets solved once and every new keyboard developer doesn’t have to deal with reimplementing this.
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Unicode input. I mean, we have this incredibly rich character set these days. Most on-screen keyboards seem to let one choose a language and to make it easy to input the common characters in that language, akin to a traditional physical keyboard. And they often provide for some common extensions to that, like superscript characters. And for some reason, a lot provide emoji support, though damned if I can see how that’s essential other than maybe on something like traditional Twitter, where character count is artificially-constrained. But support for inputting Unicode seems to be remarkably limited. On desktop computers, I’m used to using emacs, which has a ton of arbitrary input methods for inputting characters. I can use various mechanisms that do things like
^2becomes “²” or lets you search by name for Unicode characters (C-x 8 RETand then a tab-completable and searchableDIVISION SIGNbecomes “÷”) or lets you use TeX sequences (\rightarrowbecomes “→”), lets you input Unicode characters by codepoint, or a zillion other things and lets you switch among them as is convenient. An on-screen Android keyboard could do all that and unlike emacs has the ability to manipulate the actual keyboard in front of a user and could leverage “long press” and the like, but nothing like that actually exists. -
Chording seems remarkably underused. I mean, you’ve got the ability to detect multiple finger presses, but it doesn’t really seem to be exploited. I get that one-hand use is a thing, but I’d think that there’d be at least a toggle between one-hand and two-hand use to be able to leverage that.
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The “drag on spacebar to move the cursor” isn’t offered in AnySoft and some other keyboards, which seems like a reasonable way to deal with cursor movement where one doesn’t have the precision of a mouse.
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No macro support. I mean, okay, in the absence of fully-configurable keys, I’d have at least expected some limited ability to assign user-specified snippets of text to some menu or keys.
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No external editor support. For some long chunks of text – like, say, Markdown on kbin/lemmy – I’d just as soon use one of the various dedicated Markdown editors than the in-browser editor.
I just want swipe-typing and typo correction, with a good look, responsiveness, and no crashing. I haven’t found out a single FOSS app that can do that.
I use OpenBoard, its simplistic, but it works well for my needs, and its probably the best FOSS option I’ve seen. Florisboard has a lot of potential so I’ll probably switch to that in the future when it improves, its FOSS and pretty close to Gboard.
I have to keep pitching OpenBoard with Gesture typing because it combines the best from OB and FB (and GB I guess) and it saved my sanity
Again sorry for keeping to pitch this but there’s OpenBoard with Gesture typing, a fucking lifesaver!
Same. I missed swiping at first, but it was getting so unreliable that I think I’m better off now that I’m getting used to it. It fixes my two major annoyances with the AOSP keyboard, though: occasionally losing suggestions until clearing cache and force restarting, and no suggestions in search fields.
Once you get used to swiping backspace to delete, and swiping space to move the cursor, it’s hard to switch to anything else.
I see the Florisboard has similar features, plus a nice toolbar. Are there any bugs or security issues preventing it from being used?
I prefer SwiftKey. Been using it since 2011 or so. I tried gboard and it’s… Fine? I mainly use SwiftKey for a few reasons:
- I prefer the minimal theme that I’m using.
- I’ve used it forever
- I like the way it handles gifs and emojis
- Swiping for punctuation is extremely quick. I dislike having to hold it on other keyboards.
I wholeheartedly agree with the swiping punctuation. That and swiping on the space bar to switch keyboard configuration is the main reason for sticking to SwiftKey. Writing in several languages where you need special characters in each language, having to hold down a button in order to switch the keyboard is frustratingly slow.
One extra point is also that SwiftKey inserts the most likely prediction when clicking space. Whenever I’ve used gboard, it’s so frustrating, that my fingers have to click the prediction in order to insert it.
I’ve tried so many other keyboard, but stick with SwiftKey because of the swiping punctuation next to the space bar. I just can’t get used to anything else.
It’s so habitual at this point and I was really frustrated when something else wouldn’t do that.
How’s the gesture recognition accuracy? I long for the days of swype but gboard is the only one that’s come close to me.
I think it’s a little worse than GB, but I’ve not used GB for years so I can’t compare directly. It works almost perfectly when I give at least some effort into hitting the right keys, and then there’s always the suggestions, so unless I’m really careless or typing some unusual words, it’s good.
GB also took me very long to get used to…
