What's your favourite keyboard app? ⌨️

Mike Stevens 🇦🇺 S23U@lemdro.idmod to Android@lemdro.id – 133 points –

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?

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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".

Thank you for that recommendation. Was using AnySoftKeyboard for ages and got very frustrated with autocorrect and space bar position. Now, I can ditch it for something that works.

Yep. Much as I hate to say it, GBoard just feels good in a way that none of the other major swipe keyboards have for me.

GBoard without internet access is good compromise for me.

I agree. I've tried so many FOSS keyboards and no matter how hard I try, I just have to go back to gboard. It's wild how hard it is to find a good keyboard. I can't even use the stock Samsung one anymore

Same, I scrolled too far to find another gboard user lol.

I've tried every FOSS keyboard out there, about a year ago or so. I'm back to Gboard.

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:

  • Some keyboards aren't great when it comes to arrow keys/control keys/other keys useful in Termux or ConnectBot to Linux systems.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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 ^2 becomes "²" or lets you search by name for Unicode characters (C-x 8 RET and then a tab-completable and searchable DIVISION SIGN becomes "÷") or lets you use TeX sequences (\rightarrow becomes "→"), 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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 was really looking forward to Florisboard, but it's been almost a year since the last update.

And unfortunately, the lack of support for non-English suggestions is a deal-breaker for me.

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?

My biggest issue is it currently doesn't have text prediction fully working. Once it gets that, I'll probably switch.

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'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.

Adding a comma or a question mark on iOS is maddening when you're used to SwiftKey.

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.

OpenBoard with Gesture typing

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...

SwiftKey. There's some things I don't love about it, but I'm trapped by swipe punctuation and predicting emoji from words. Every so often I get mad at SK and try something else, but it never lasts.

I'm trapped by swipe to delete. I know others have it but with limitations like swipe from the backspace key. Years of swiping left anywhere on the keyboard to delete a word has made it impossible to use anything else.

I have tried so many keyboards, FOSS one included but nothing is as refined as Gboard without internet access.

How do you disable internet access for Gboard?

Something like Netguard or RethinkDNS will work. Basically an app that creates a firewall using the VPN slot.

I use Gboard because the prediction is better than the others. As a Japanese speaker, the choice is limited.

Hey yo I also type 50/50 in Japanese and English and came here wondering if there were any Gboard alternatives out there yet.

Every few months I keep re-trying SwiftKey and the Samsung Keyboard, but I keep going back to GBoard because when I swipe it gets it right a lot more of the time than the other two.

I've tried many, but I always come back to SwiftKey. It was one of the things I missed the most when I tried iOS for some time (SwiftKey on iOS sucks).

Gboard

autocorrect and suggestion are great both in English and French and the performance is smooth af

Previously I was using Swiftkey because at that time the Google keyboard wasn't supporting multiple language simultaneously but Swiftkey's performance was extremely bad. As soon as Gboard added simultaneous multi language support, I switched and never looked back

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.

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

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

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.

I use GBoard but since you asked for favorite, mine is Word Flow, Windows Phone's keyboard. When MS killed Windows Phone they kind of ported it to iOS but never to Android.

The Windows 10 keyboard is very similar to this Word Flow and the closest I've been to recreate it on Android is using RBoard and the Xbox theme but since I don't have a real reason to root I haven't done it again, so I'm just using the regular GBoard. Also, last time I checked (few years ago) the Xbox theme didn't have a dark mode so that's another reason not to use it.

I'd use SwiftKey but they keys are to thin. I've tried using skins like the Surface Duo but still too thin for me.

Another keyboard I liked was TouchPal but I believe was removed from the Play Store for having malware, if I recall correctly.

Grammarly bc it makes really good suggestions bc i word oorly.

I used to love Swiftkey before it sold out to Microsoft. I use Gboard with network permissions off nowadays.

Aside from the useless features overkill, I still think SwiftKey is the best Android keyboard. I ignore 90% of the stuff they implement. Quite frankly I am almost unable to type quick without it.

Unfortunately as a multi lingual user which includes using a more "exotic" language. There is not much choice asides from either SwiftKey or Gboard (I use SwiftKey)

I love Multiling, but unfortunately it is not actively supported anymore

Super customisable, helpful for a Colemak user like, and shortcuts for select all, copy, paste etc in ALL text inputs even if they blocked such things. Also many ways to customize text and things like special symbols etc

Using GBoard begrudgingly because there's no better alternative for me personally. I depend on the swipe typing and gestures a lot. Personalisation is off, and I don't use the next-word suggestions that often.

I don't really like SwiftKey's design or its Microsoft affiliation. I wish there was a good open-source alternative. Florisboard looks promising, but the last time I tried it, it was still lacking in features.

I'm the same way regarding quirks. I've been using Gboard and for a while bounced between that and Samsung Keyboard. Gboard has the best overall usability for me but a couple things I'm not a fan of: Gboard deleting clipboard history (only from Gboard as it's still available elsewhere), and including \ as a long press symbol rather than /,where you have to tsp the symbols key and then tap /.

Samsung Keyboard has a few quirks as well, but the biggest was predictive text isn't as good as Gboard. But I like the customization of it. But I can't see the symbols on the keys as well as I can on Gboard.

I was a fan of Chroma Keyboard years ago because I liked that it would change color based on the app.

fyi, long-pressing the period key on Gboard gives you some more symbols to choose from, including /.

also includes some symbols that are already behind other keys which is kinda weird.

Yeah, I know, but it just seemed weird to include \ when / seems to be more widely used? Or maybe it's just me lol.

I tried SwiftKey for about a week or so a month ago but I'm too used to GBoard to make the switch.

What I like about GB that SK doesn't have or is too different:

  • speech to text integrated into the keyboard. The Bing app is probably the best at this, especially for my non-native English accent, too bad SK doesn't have its own implementation
  • I can set up the keys to show their long press symbols
  • the colon character is at an awkward place for my finger to reach
  • GB's swipe function can figure out much more easily what language I wanted to type in
  • SK shows every possible accented version of the character that I long pressed on, and the one that I wanted was usually at an awkward place to reach. GB on the other hand sorts those of my native language right next to the original character, and only offers a few that I never use.

SwiftKey does your first two bullets and has full on Bing chatgpt built into the keyboard including getting it to compose messages for you and gives you options to rewrite your messages in different tones like professional, casual, funny, etc.

I feel like most of your issues with swiftkey could be fixed by playing around around with themes/settings a bit to find what fits your needs.

It seems like you were right, it was the theme that I chose that didn't support showing the long press symbols, even though I enabled them in the settings.

Regarding the voice to text, for me it just opens Google's voice input, it doesn't seem like it has its own built in VTT.

I'm still using swype. Nothing else competes, and the two closest are owned by the two companies I'm least willing to use a keyboard by.

Since the 99% of the available keyboards doesn't have the Ctrl key for some weird reasons, my options are pretty limited.

For a long time I used BlackBerry Keyboard, but after an update the prediction got abysmally bad.

Now I use Unexpected Keyboard with some modified layout. Doesn't have any dictionary or prediction, but has all the keys I need.

I just wanted to have a keyboard thats not cluttered with tons of superfluous features so I use simple keyboard configured in a way that it only types and nothing else. I even turned off spellcheck and autocomplete, though that is mostly due to me having bad experiences some years back.

I've lived with a custom build of AnySoftKeyboard for several years, where I've made my own Ukrainian keyboard, with the same amount of buttons as English keyboard and extra letters invoked with a long-press, so that I got the same size keys in every language I use. I've abandoned it for Gboard, because of a built-in password manager. Default Cyrillic keyboard has extra letters invoked with a long-press for a bunch of Slavic languages, it's not the same but I would not complain.

I'm similarly picky and have been unable to leave SwiftKey.

But good news, the beta version recently added image support to the clipboard.

Same. Typing in 3 languages without having to specify which one, is fantastic with SwiftKey. And it supports the rather obscure Colemak keyboard layout!

I use Florisboard with a custom M3 theme. If I remember I tried a bunch of keyboards and ended up sticking with FlorisBoard.

I also like Florisboard for the customizability. Hoping it gets next word suggestion features soon.

Minuum Keyboard master race!

Glad to hear Minuum is still up and running. I couldn't get super comfortable with it, but I love the concept... and I still remember that first, awful announcement video with the poorly mixed vocals that made it sound like the founder's name was Will Wompwomp.

I still think it's the future of keyboards. I will die on the hill that QWERTY makes zero logical sense for touchscreen keyboards and that not utilising machine learning for fuzzy typing is a waste of processor.

I remember using and loving minuum when it came out especially because I had a smaller phone at the time. But it hasn't updated in quite a while.

Are there any other keyboard apps out there that have the same layout options?

Sadly no other keyboard with the same layout yet. I'm still hoping for a patched version, maybe Revanced or for someone just to recreate it as an open source release.

Simple Keyboard app from F-Droid (Minimal App)

Hacker's Keyboard. It's the only one other than Gboard I ever use, as it was the only one I had found with a full desktop keyboard. I do terminal and remote desktop shit a lot, so I sometimes need the keys that aren't typically available on a phone keyboard.

I'm confused about your issue with copying and pasting images with swiftkey. I do it all the time with no issues. Long press copy image - > long press paste. I just tested it copying it into text messages and emails to make sure I'm not insane and it works flawlessly.

Used Swype until cancelled. Tried many gesture keyboards and Gboard is best now.

I've liked SwiftKey a lot more since they added the bing/ai/chatgpt button. Although I'd say about 25 percent of the time it refused to answer my question claiming I was being argumentative or the answer would be unfair.

Still there's tons of themes and the suggestions while not brilliant I'm sure do speed up my typing a lot.

Any FOSS keyboard recommendations that support simplified Chinese?

I like Gboard, Swiftkey was my favorite for a long time before Gboard seemed to outpace it. Clipboard functionally, both history and images, swipe to delete, text input, it's just a tight experience most of the time.

I don't really have a favourite. I use OpenBoard but it has it's issues. Hopefully Floris will improve enough to become my default.

Google keyboard by a mile but before that Samsung keyboard which I still love, anyway I have zero interest in trying other keyboards

For customizability, I currently use AnySoftKeyboard, and also like Florisboard (although waiting on next word suggestion).

I still use Gboard the most. My wife uses Samsung keyboard and prefers it over Gboard.

I don't have s Samsung phone so I can't test that.

I use Openboard. I migrated from iOS and found Openboard to be the most familiar, with key borders turned on in settings.

I've heard that SwiftKey tracks keystrokes, so I'm in the same boat as you. SwiftKey is incredible, but I'd rather lean more into privacy focused alternatives.

I use SwiftKey but block internet access to it.