I wish Heliboard was usable, but it has so many small but show-stopping bugs or omissions.
I know, I know. Should fix it myself and do a pull request. Hopefully one day got time for that, like fixing the over-scaled emoji picked (that breaks kaomoji due to the scaling) or the lack of a search box there. It’s easily the closest FOSS keyboard to the big two (Gboard and SwiftKey), so with a bit more work it could really compete with them I feel.
With FUTO it feels nearly perfect, only issue is that in daily use I write a weird mix of German and English even in the same sentence, and hence I need full mixed-language input which it doesn’t seem to support (yet).
For a second I really thought I had now finally found an alternative to Gboard but unfortunately the swiping detection is really poor and I need it to be able to use German and English at the same time. So I guess it’s still back to Gboard. :(
Out of curiosity, do you like swiping the most? Futo’s voice recognition is really good actually, I don’t use it and prefer typing myself, it just seems like normal typing is the only thing I can do the most consistently and I seem to be decently quick at it.
Yeah, I swipe probably 80-90% of the time, maybe even more. Gboard works pretty well for me. It’s just way faster than typing every letter individually. Especially long words usually have a pretty good detection rate. For example writing this text I had to correct maybe 3 words, the rest was detected correctly on the first try and it takes me 1-2 seconds per word.
Really? I’ve been using Heliboard (as a replacement for florisboard) and I have had literally no complaints works just as well as gboard did for me. I 100% recommend Heliboard I think its 10/10
Thanks for the recommendation! It looks really good so far. Well, except for the swipe typing. If they can perfect swipe typing, I’d be so impressed. Even Gboard does it terribly. I noticed they have a public website to help train swiping. That’s neat. https://swipe.futo.org/
After I tap a suggestion , if I hit a punctuation key , it leaves a space after the word . (like in that sentence .) Gboard removes the space automatically, and Heliboard doesn’t add it to begin with.
Turns out, you can turn off automatic spaces entirely, and that feels better.
There’s a github for issue tacking and a Discord for discussions. These are good signs. I really like what I see so far.
If you want to keep using the automatic space setting, set it to insert on suggestions and punctuation. That setting automatically moves the space from after the word to after the punctuation.
Gboard combines Japanese and German in a way that is properly usable. I wish there was a better alternative. That being said, support for east Asian languages (and easy switching) isn’t relevant for most.
That “g” stands for Google. You don’t pay for Google products, so you are the product being sold. You touch your keyboard often. You press sensitive and embarrassing things into it.
I rely on the glide typing to much, and all I’ve tried don’t feel as smooth. But I’m on GrapheneOS and disallowed internet access to GBoard, so while not great, it’s fine for now
The addition of an option is a good reminder for you to talk about your book. Fine.
GBoard is still king for those of us who use 3 languages at the same time.
Unrequested suggestions and virtus signaling are sooo annoying…
Still waiting for them to give me the option to make the keyboard automatically switch to floating in landscape mode (like it did before for a short period of time!) rather than do this:
Huh I never type in portrait if I can help it, my thumbs are way too big for it. Landscape any time I’m typing and even then I wish I could make the keyboard bigger without losing visibility to what I’m typing/replying to. I also don’t swipe type, have never really liked it.
There’s a bug dating back to October that made Heliboard unusable for me, because it cuts off half of the keyboard in landscape. Looks like it just got fixed but hasn’t been rolled out yet. Meanwhile heliboard is just really bad about learning new words (tends to think capitalized words are a different word and adds them to the dictionary when you start a sentence with them, can’t seem to handle autocorrecting to a word with an apostrophe). I gave up on it and went back to Gboard and I don’t think I’m going back. Honestly I’m real frustrated with the state of android keyboards right now. Swiftkey used to be awesome but MS ruined it. Gboard is better than it used to be but it barely has an options for customizing it. I don’t know anything better.
Last time I saw anyone mention FlorisBoard, a whole post’s comments section was recommending it. Almost like the post got brigaded by astroturfers shilling FlorisBoard. At the time it didn’t even have autocorrect or other basic features. It felt like the Twilight zone.
Now, I don’t trust anyone who recommends it because it had literally no features over an already established keyboard like HeliBoard, yet a entire post of evangelists coming out of the woodwork. Makes no sense.
I mean I like using FlorisBoard as it has fairly frequent updates. If you enjoy using Heliboard that’s also fair.
Almost like the post got brigades by astroturfers shilling FlorisBoard. At the time it didn’t even have autocorrect or other basic features. It felt like the Twilight zone.
Now, I don’t trust anyone who recommends it because it had literally no features over an already established keyboard like HeliBoard, yet a entire post of evangelists coming out of the woodwork. Makes no sense.
Please don’t make this a tribal/team camp thing. Bashing other projects is quite disgusting and offensive especially without any real reason.
Again if you enjoy Heliboard that’s cool, just don’t diss and talk down additional FOSS projects. The FOSS ecosysten is different from the traditional proprietary ecosystem like Microsoft and Oracle.
It was eerie. I’m just telling you what my honest impression was. The thread was “What’s your favorite Android keyboard?” and like 8 of the first 10 comments were for Florisboard, despite it being far behind other keyboards, and I had never even heard of it. It made me feel it was some sort of scam keyboard. It’s similar to a situation where if every YouTube influencer is telling me I need to insall something, that’s a giant red flag. Especially when that thing was objectively worse than other options at the time.
Don’t tell me I can’t comment with my honest experiences.
And here you are touting a feature that other keyboards have had for years.
Swiping on the space bar only moves characters, the faster/longer you swipe, the more characters or words you swipe. There are no other functionalities that overlap or conflict with this
I have multiple languages on gboard…If you’re too slow with the swipe it will open up the language selection menu. There are a total of three buttons to switch languages
From their github:
Glide typing (only with closed source
library )
library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available ( can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here (click on the file and then “raw” or the tiny download button)
Easy enough to install, but despite using a closed-source lib from Google, it doesn’t seem to work nearly as well as GBoard. Feels like I have to go back and correct every other word, and it doesn’t seem to choose words contextually or learn from the ones I select.
It gave me the word “Ines” 3 times just now while trying to swipe “ones”. Trying to swipe “pretty” gave me Perry, prey, Peru, petty, piety, pottery, and pet before I gave up and typed it manually (or “toured it nakedly”.)
Back to GBoard for me I think. Unfortunately, I don’t see the benefit of a FOSS keyboard that is forced to use closed-source Google code anyway for an objectively worse experience if you rely on swiping. FlorisBoard says they’re working on their own implementation of “glide typing” that sounds promising, so I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
Wow, it took them this long to include a backspace button? Jeez…
(yes I only read the headline, no I’m not going to read the page, yes I think it’s funny, and no I don’t care that you don’t. thanks for coming to my ted talk.)
I’m hoping it works well. Biggest thing keeping me from switching is how easy it is to switch to Japanese and Chinese, as someone who enjoys music in both languages but can barely speak any. This will definitely help if I accidentally deleted something in either of those languages while looking up a song or trying to translate something. Or just if I’m typing on my txt file app and accidentally erase something I need, since the app has no undo buttons.
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Nice. I love Gboard. One of the few things Google nails.
A good reminder to stop using gboard. Others have pointed to alternatives. Heliboard is another FOSS option that’s had this for years.
Herebisbmybissuevwithbheliboard
That shakes me to my core. Lol
I wish Heliboard was usable, but it has so many small but show-stopping bugs or omissions.
I know, I know. Should fix it myself and do a pull request. Hopefully one day got time for that, like fixing the over-scaled emoji picked (that breaks kaomoji due to the scaling) or the lack of a search box there. It’s easily the closest FOSS keyboard to the big two (Gboard and SwiftKey), so with a bit more work it could really compete with them I feel.
I tried heliboard. It apparently kicks ass on the back end but the front end sucks and that’s the part I use.
FUTO Keyboard is the one!
With FUTO it feels nearly perfect, only issue is that in daily use I write a weird mix of German and English even in the same sentence, and hence I need full mixed-language input which it doesn’t seem to support (yet).
For a second I really thought I had now finally found an alternative to Gboard but unfortunately the swiping detection is really poor and I need it to be able to use German and English at the same time. So I guess it’s still back to Gboard. :(
The swipe feature isn’t quite done yet, they have a dataset they are building that you can contribute to in a fun way if you want.
Soon the swipe feature will be good.
https://swipe.futo.org/
That’s great to hear. I just swiped a lot of words, hope it helps 😄
Out of curiosity, do you like swiping the most? Futo’s voice recognition is really good actually, I don’t use it and prefer typing myself, it just seems like normal typing is the only thing I can do the most consistently and I seem to be decently quick at it.
Yeah, I swipe probably 80-90% of the time, maybe even more. Gboard works pretty well for me. It’s just way faster than typing every letter individually. Especially long words usually have a pretty good detection rate. For example writing this text I had to correct maybe 3 words, the rest was detected correctly on the first try and it takes me 1-2 seconds per word.
Thanks for the recommendation, trying FUTO out and really liking it. Gboard posts end in good FOSS recs.
Really? I’ve been using Heliboard (as a replacement for florisboard) and I have had literally no complaints works just as well as gboard did for me. I 100% recommend Heliboard I think its 10/10
Does it not, for example, have weirdly oversized emoji in the picker on your phone and this breaks the kaomoji?
I do not care about them tbh. All the emojis I’ve tried are fine, but I don’t use the kaomojis.
I tried to love Heliboard too, had similar issues.
Moved to FUTO Keyboard after a recommendation on here, really happy with it
Thanks for the recommendation! It looks really good so far. Well, except for the swipe typing. If they can perfect swipe typing, I’d be so impressed. Even Gboard does it terribly. I noticed they have a public website to help train swiping. That’s neat. https://swipe.futo.org/
After I tap a suggestion , if I hit a punctuation key , it leaves a space after the word . (like in that sentence .) Gboard removes the space automatically, and Heliboard doesn’t add it to begin with.
Turns out, you can turn off automatic spaces entirely, and that feels better.
There’s a github for issue tacking and a Discord for discussions. These are good signs. I really like what I see so far.
If you want to keep using the automatic space setting, set it to insert on suggestions and punctuation. That setting automatically moves the space from after the word to after the punctuation.
Quality assessment A man of taste, discernment and sophistication
Gboard combines Japanese and German in a way that is properly usable. I wish there was a better alternative. That being said, support for east Asian languages (and easy switching) isn’t relevant for most.
Why don’t we like gboard again?
Personal data collection
That “g” stands for Google. You don’t pay for Google products, so you are the product being sold. You touch your keyboard often. You press sensitive and embarrassing things into it.
I rely on the glide typing to much, and all I’ve tried don’t feel as smooth. But I’m on GrapheneOS and disallowed internet access to GBoard, so while not great, it’s fine for now
Heliboard has glide typing lol, although the file has to be downloaded manually iirc.
Maybe I’ll give it a try again. Glide typing seems to be proprietary tho
I’ve been using swiftkey for my glide typing for a while
Swiftkey was the first to steal it from Swype I’m pretty sure
I was looking for an alternative to fossify, thanks for the recommendation
But no Gboard means no voice typing :( I use that thing every day.
Heliboard with Futo voice typing ( unlike gboard it works offline)
They are not as good as Google’s especially for languages other than English.
Gboard voice typing backend:
The addition of an option is a good reminder for you to talk about your book. Fine. GBoard is still king for those of us who use 3 languages at the same time. Unrequested suggestions and virtus signaling are sooo annoying…
You took the time to comment just like me. I use a few languages too, yours simply sounds like virtue signalling for gboard. ¯|(ツ)/¯
it’s 2025 and having a freaking CTRL key on soft keyboards is still a luxury and obscure thing.
Why? Give us the CTRL key, and that’s that.
Still waiting for them to give me the option to make the keyboard automatically switch to floating in landscape mode (like it did before for a short period of time!) rather than do this:
Not sure I understand why you would want that. But more options for gboard would always be good.
I have a Pixel 7 pro and on the off chance I have to type in landscape it’s super inconvenient to write anything on that long ass keyboard lmao
The floating keyboard lets me swipe type with one hand, since I can reach the whole thing with just my thumb!
Huh I never type in portrait if I can help it, my thumbs are way too big for it. Landscape any time I’m typing and even then I wish I could make the keyboard bigger without losing visibility to what I’m typing/replying to. I also don’t swipe type, have never really liked it.
Haha florisboard already had that
… wait, you guys live without undo button??
- HeliBoard gang
Same here
- FUTO gang
There’s a bug dating back to October that made Heliboard unusable for me, because it cuts off half of the keyboard in landscape. Looks like it just got fixed but hasn’t been rolled out yet. Meanwhile heliboard is just really bad about learning new words (tends to think capitalized words are a different word and adds them to the dictionary when you start a sentence with them, can’t seem to handle autocorrecting to a word with an apostrophe). I gave up on it and went back to Gboard and I don’t think I’m going back. Honestly I’m real frustrated with the state of android keyboards right now. Swiftkey used to be awesome but MS ruined it. Gboard is better than it used to be but it barely has an options for customizing it. I don’t know anything better.
It took a year and a half to develop an “undo” feature? WTF is happening at Google?
About time.
I have this plus several other features like shifting left and right on the spacebar with FlorisBoard
If by shifting left and right you mean moving the cursor, that has been in gboard for 5+ years.
fair enough although I’m more interested in FOSS🌱 apps rather than proprietary and especially Google🗑️ apps
Are FOSS apps inherently for newbs? Since you gave it the sprout marker from FFXIV?
oh uhh I used the sprout emoji from FlorisBoard to symbolize growth.
not really sure how to answer this as Free Open Source Software (FOSS) apps are just more trustworthy than proprietary apps.
It mostly depends on the development age of the project.
Being brutally honest FOSS apps that are:
So “Are FOSS apps inherently for newbs?” is kinda hard to answer.
If instead I was asked: “Is x FOSS app easier to use than y proprietary app?” this I could probably give you a more definitive satisfactory answer.
Haha, thanks for giving it a serious answer, I was just making a silly joke. 😅🫶
no worries🤗
Oh shit that is some s-tier emoji use haha
Why not HeliBoard?
Last time I saw anyone mention FlorisBoard, a whole post’s comments section was recommending it. Almost like the post got brigaded by astroturfers shilling FlorisBoard. At the time it didn’t even have autocorrect or other basic features. It felt like the Twilight zone.
Now, I don’t trust anyone who recommends it because it had literally no features over an already established keyboard like HeliBoard, yet a entire post of evangelists coming out of the woodwork. Makes no sense.
?
I mean I like using FlorisBoard as it has fairly frequent updates. If you enjoy using Heliboard that’s also fair.
Please don’t make this a tribal/team camp thing. Bashing other projects is quite disgusting and offensive especially without any real reason.
Again if you enjoy Heliboard that’s cool, just don’t diss and talk down additional FOSS projects. The FOSS ecosysten is different from the traditional proprietary ecosystem like Microsoft and Oracle.
It was eerie. I’m just telling you what my honest impression was. The thread was “What’s your favorite Android keyboard?” and like 8 of the first 10 comments were for Florisboard, despite it being far behind other keyboards, and I had never even heard of it. It made me feel it was some sort of scam keyboard. It’s similar to a situation where if every YouTube influencer is telling me I need to insall something, that’s a giant red flag. Especially when that thing was objectively worse than other options at the time.
Don’t tell me I can’t comment with my honest experiences.
And here you are touting a feature that other keyboards have had for years.
Yes but the space bar has other functions in gboard so it’s a 50/50 shot if you move 5 chars back or activate a random thing you never want to use.
Swiping on the space bar only moves characters, the faster/longer you swipe, the more characters or words you swipe. There are no other functionalities that overlap or conflict with this
It’s also a language selector.
I have multiple languages on gboard…If you’re too slow with the swipe it will open up the language selection menu. There are a total of three buttons to switch languages
Yes but I miss swipe texting so much.
Heliboard is basically like florisboard but you can use swipe typing.
Really? Where? I’ve been using Heliboard and i don’t see a swipe-text option.
Heliboard > Gesture Typing
From their github: Glide typing (only with closed source library )
Wow. Thank you!
There is a way to get swipe typing working
Go on…
Settings> Advanced > Load Gesture Typing Library
Easy enough to install, but despite using a closed-source lib from Google, it doesn’t seem to work nearly as well as GBoard. Feels like I have to go back and correct every other word, and it doesn’t seem to choose words contextually or learn from the ones I select.
It gave me the word “Ines” 3 times just now while trying to swipe “ones”. Trying to swipe “pretty” gave me Perry, prey, Peru, petty, piety, pottery, and pet before I gave up and typed it manually (or “toured it nakedly”.)
Back to GBoard for me I think. Unfortunately, I don’t see the benefit of a FOSS keyboard that is forced to use closed-source Google code anyway for an objectively worse experience if you rely on swiping. FlorisBoard says they’re working on their own implementation of “glide typing” that sounds promising, so I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
You have to manually add the swipe typing library it in advanced setting. You can find the library here. https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/tree/46fdf2b550035ca69299ce312fa158e7ade36967/app/src/main/jniLibs
Never heard of floris. Trying it out right now!
It’s a pass for me, due to lack of dictionary. Will keep it installed and try it again, when it’s been added
Oh cool, thanks for sharing this!
I already had this in futo keyboard
Wow, it took them this long to include a backspace button? Jeez…
(yes I only read the headline, no I’m not going to read the page, yes I think it’s funny, and no I don’t care that you don’t. thanks for coming to my ted talk.)
I’m hoping it works well. Biggest thing keeping me from switching is how easy it is to switch to Japanese and Chinese, as someone who enjoys music in both languages but can barely speak any. This will definitely help if I accidentally deleted something in either of those languages while looking up a song or trying to translate something. Or just if I’m typing on my txt file app and accidentally erase something I need, since the app has no undo buttons.
Fun fact it’s always had undo if you switch to the Japanese keyboard
I have absolutely no idea why that’s the only way you’ve been able to do it until now
OK they added a feature but is it usable yet? Gboard always seemed like the worst option to me. Never did do input right.
finally