The best (mostly) open source keyboard solution I've found

An excerpt from their writeup:

There are a whole lot of different keyboard solutions on Android, and let’s be honest: a lot of the offerings aren’t great. While many of them have strengths, I initially struggled in my de-googling of my life to find a keyboard that had everything I wanted with regards to layout, swipe typing, and voice input. What follows is the best method I’ve been able to come up with (credit to the cowboy-hatted individual who clued in me into FUTO voice).

  • boomzilla@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    Using Google play services free GrapheneOS on a Pixel 6 (so swipe even works with reduced screen estate) with the FUTO keyboard and this paragraph was completely written with its swipe feature. The only problematic words were GraphenOS and swipe.

    Writing this by tapping again as I’m actually faster that way. But from what I can say, swiping works really good. I appreciate the authors effort but I won’t pull in some Google library again (especially related to monitoring keyboard input) via a hackish way.

    I’m completely satisfied with FUTO as an all-in-one solution already. The voice input using local models works especially good. I’m not 100% sure but I could swear the devs changed the key sizes in one of the current updates. They’re perfectly sized now. The one thing I miss is a TAB key for autocompletition, when I’m logged in on a SSH terminal. But otherwise it’s feature complete for me.

  • limerod@reddthat.comMEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I use cleverkeys keyboard and futo voice for superior typing experience. The suggestions are simply unbearable by anyone.

    • scrchngwsl@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I found cleverkeys to be terrible at swipe/gesture typing. It would fail at even simple, common, seemingly unambiguous words. Heliboard + gboard swipe lib was orders of magnitude better.

      I still use cleverkeys for termux though as the key gestures are brilliant.

  • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    My big gripe with heliboard is that I can’t change key size. (Unless you can and I missed it please tell me) Going from Gboard to heliboard I struggle to get the right words with swipe due to the size difference and it’s frustrating.

    I have to use gboard on my work phone so there’s no just getting used to it unfortunately.

    Edit to add changing keyboard height has helped quite a bit. I’m still a little off but this is much more usable.

  • technopagan@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    That’s been exactly my setup for a while. Tried with all the others (Futo Keyboard / Whisper+ etc etc) and THIS setup you listed is the most versatile, reliable, multi-lingual setup I’ve managed to run on AOSP. Thanks for mentioning it!

  • statler_waldorf@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    If I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like you get gboard’s swiping without Google’s spying. This could be exactly what I’m looking for. I’ve tried foss keyboards but none of them swipe worth a damn yet.

    Will have to give this a shot. It’s been one of the things keeping me from jumping to Graphene or something.

  • Carighan Maconar@piefed.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Question to those that use it: Does heliboard have a floating mode like GBoard/SwiftKey/FUTO have? I have a tablet and a full-screen keyboard just feels very weird once I got used to floating.