FlorisBoard | FOSS keyboard that respects your privacy

vintprox@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 165 points –
florisboard.org

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
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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.

https://github.com/Helium314/openboard/releases

Openboard fork with swipe typing

Note that this fork relies on the proprietary Google library to do this. It's not really an alternative.

Iiiinteresting. Will test that out. Thanks!

Edit: works great! Thank you so much.

You should give AnySoftKeyboard a spin. Has word suggestions that are really good and the swiping works really well too

I kind of dismissed it as the project looks more or less dead on GH...