Really as similar as possible but I guess the must haves for me are:
- Dark theme
- Swipe to type ability (I usually tap but definitely want swiping as well)
- Searchable emoji’s
- Word suggestions
Nice to have:
- Text editing tools for moving cursor just one character at a time through button presses
- Clipboard button
- Copied text automatically becomes next suggested word the first time the keyboard is invoked after copying the text
- Suggested next word.
AnySoftKeyboard
Damn… That app is still updated? I remember using it on my POS phone almost 10 years ago.
It is still being maintained, but barely. Last commit on their Git repo was three weeks ago, and their last release was almost two years ago.
So far for my best efforts at searching I’ve gone with open board. I like it a lot but it doesn’t fit my requirements in that there appears to be no swipe to type functionality and emojis are, like in many keyboards, sorted in to unhelpful categories with no ability to search. I also don’t like that there’s no kind of numbers page where the keyboard consists exclusively of numerals which are on larger than normal keys.
For the sake of it at least not being gboard it’s worth putting up with this I think, but it’s a shame nothing could just completely replace it with no compromise. Very pleased that it looks nearly identical except a a bit cleaner and has this great feature where you can use the space key like a track pad to scroll left or right through text.
Florisboard on F-Droid was looking real good for me, but they stopped updating 15 months ago. Currently in alpha. Not sure if it’s still being worked on or abandoned.
Trying it out now as I reply. Quite like it, for similar reasons to openboard. I’m not sure why, but i think I type a little bit more accurately when I use this compared to openboard and also gboard, which is interesting, can’t really see why that would be. It also has that awesome space bar trackpad feature.
Sadly, like openboard, it has no swipe to type either, nor a searchable emoji board. It’s a real shame there seems to have been a freeze on updates because the current version doesn’t yet support the word suggestions. This really breaks the app as a daily keyboard unless they ever resume updates. It’s good though for sure.
Openboard
Oddly enough, there aren’t many open-source keyboards out there. At least not many that are sophisticated enough to meet these requirements. Of course, the big hitters that do meet these requirements would be OpenBoard, FlorisBoard and AnySoftKeyboard: the latter being extremely powerful in terms of options (of course this is my own opinion).
I would like to also recommend 8vim. It’s also open-source, has swipe-to-type (will be extremely apparent when you try it). No suggestions though. But it does emphasise a lot on text-editing. I will warn that it looks a bit too outlandish to some people’s likings ツ
You could install TrackerControl and just block internet access to your keyboard.
