I came across this purely by accident, but it checks pretty much all of my boxes for a good keyboard:
✅ It is simple, beautiful, and customizable. (I like to use AMOLED black, and increase the height a bit)
✅ It has built in offline voice typing. I had been using sayboard for this which was not bad, but so far this is a little quicker and more accurate.
✅ It has easy to use settings (I used ASK for years despite the mess of the settings)
✅ It’s FOSS. Edit: Apparently, it’s currently under a development license that limits certain types of use. The source code is open, and the stated intent is to make it fully FOSS when it is completed.
✅ It has swipe typing. I was using heliboard with a gesture typing library added, but it’snice to have it built in.
It has some interesting features like using an adjustable LLM for text prediction. It will be really interesting to see how it shapes out.
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It is not FOSS, by the way. They’ve put it under a proprietary license: https://gitlab.futo.org/alex/latinime/-/blob/master/FTL_LICENSE.md
Thanks, I’ve updated the description!
Heliboard. I didn’t think anything would take me away from Swiftkey. I tried all the keyboards on f-droid multiple times over the years. But I’ve finally switched. Check out Heliboard.
Love heliboard.
I am still keeping it until I’m sure that I’m making the switch permanently. I’ll probably put up an update in a few days. FUTO does not yet have some of the more specialized features like clipboard memory or one-handed mode. I do occasionally use them, so I’ll probably miss them. OTOH, the built in swipe and voice typing are a major plus for me as well as some of the other small things.
Oh man, I just can’t get away from Multiling O Keyboard. it’s not open source, hasn’t been updated for years (though the developer did update all the dictionaries for Android 14 recently) but its customization options just can’t be beat.
I use swipe left and right for delete and space and auto-correct with a dictionary I’ve been adding to for years. It allows you to add custom emoticons and words, it has a тяαทรƒ๑я๓ functions to add various gimmicks to text… It has an option for swiping, too. You can edit which letters have what symbols above it, too.
Here’s what my keyboard looks like. Notice the handy copy, paste, home, end, undo and redo buttons, too. Which are also completely customizable. Haven’t found anything that truly does everything Multiling O does.
Actually, I think I’ll make a new post for this. Probably will be seen more than in a two-week old post, oops.
