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?

  • humanplayer2
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    1 year ago

    Coming from SwiftKey, I’m trying Gboard just now,but how fo you survive that it doesn’t support auto-space after punctuation in anything but US English? I have Danish as my layout, with English as the second language.

    It’ll for sure take me some time to get used to.

    I miss SwiftKey’s long press to delete a word (though the swipe left from backspace might be learned, and elike the easy access to parentheses)

    It messes with me that the word that’ll be inserted when I press space is not always the middle suggestion.

    It annoys me that I can’t get rid of the mic button, despite having disabled voice.

    • MrNemobody@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      YES! I don’t get why it supports auto-space after punctuation only in US English. I mean… seriously? After all these year. If they want, I can implement it for them.

    • cole@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      you actually can get rid of the mic button now. You can customize the entire top bar

      • humanplayer2
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        1 year ago

        Ok, I did that just update over night? Yes, I can remove all the icons! Nice! Thank you!