this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I've been down this rabbit hole and here's the haul from Wonderland:

Conventional:

  • Heliboard - Has glide typing, but the available library is unstable and old. The most polished.

  • Florisboard - Currently under heavy development, but what's there is more than usable and very well done.

  • Unexpected Keyboard - I actually love this one, but as a Fold user I need some auto correct. Uses swipe motions on each key for symbols and punctuation.

Unconventional:

  • Thumbkey - A 3x3 grid using taps and swipes to type. I flip flop between this and Heliboard atm. Has circular motions to input caps or numbers. MASSIVE amount of layouts, including language, programmer, writer and more. Easy layout switch key on the fly.

  • Flickboard - Same setup as Thumbkey. This would be my go to ever since they added a landscape layout that smart switches on inner Fold screen, but there's no separate key height for it, so you have to deal with non-uniform on one screen which isn't easy to type on. Also has circular motion for caps. No numeric, but there's the option of having a small number column.

  • 8vim - The only one of it's kind since 8pen died. I'm learning this one and it's great, but wonky on inner Fold screen. Its hard to explain, but you use circular motions around on X wheel to input whole words at a time letter by letter. Start center, drag out into a quadrant, rotate to get your letter, go back to center, without lifting go to your next quadrant for the next letter. When you're done and back on center, let go to insert space, or you can move out into a quadrant then lift to end without a space. Takes a lot of getting used to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 50 minutes ago

Fcitx5 for Chinese, and Flickboard for English. Honestly sad that there isn't a decent open-source keyboard for Japanese though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 52 minutes ago

Could you specify wether these support physical keyboards? (showing only a toolbar when one is detected). I'm using the default proprietary Kika-keyboard on my device and it's not great.

[–] DragonsInARoom 1 points 55 minutes ago

Openboard (fdroid)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago

I use the following keyboards:

  • Florisboard (supports 한굴)
  • FUTO Keyboard (supports voice input, although not very polished)
  • Typewise Offline (proprietary, best keyboard layout, good dialect support)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

After trying couple of keybords (mostly AnySoftKeyboard and TypeWise [proprietary]) I have settled on Unexpected Keyboard due to easy switch of keybords to get to japanese keyboard and tts button.

[–] daggermoon 6 points 6 hours ago

FlorisBoard

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (8 children)

I've been using FUTO Keyboard and I'm very happy with it so far. EDIT: It's not FOSS but the source code is available and you are allowed to copy/modify it, just not to make money from it. That's good enough for me.

[–] asdfasdfasdf 1 points 3 hours ago

I love it, but it has some fairly big annoying things about it and I'm disappointed to see how little movement there is to fix them in GitHub. The dev seems very insactive.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

Damn it's not FOSS? Time to jump ship

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I use Fcitx5 for its Chinese language support.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 46 minutes ago

Fcitx5 is the best for Chinese. Honestly very impressed that there is a open-source keyboard this good for Chinese. Only thing missing is fat finger error correction (like autocorrect but it works on the preedit text instead of text already output)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

I used to use Gboard for Cantonese input. I downloaded fcitx5 reading your comment and tried it for some time. There are some features noticeably missing compared to Gboard.

  • top numeric row
  • single-hand mode
  • simplified and traditional characters selection#

# Found it. It's in the settings bar at the top of the typing area. Click it open and go deep inside it.

What Gboard and fcitx5 both don't have for Jyutping input is glide typing. I wish fcitx5 have it because it is really what could make me switch and not look back. Gboard in general has better finger tap detection/correction because duh Google had more data to train on. But I will definitely start using fcitx5 because being open source is sufficient for me to switch.

For languages that isn't supported by its plugins like Japanese, I have to keep using Gboard though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

Preference for AnySoftKeyboard.

Why is there so many censored posts about keyboard apps?

[–] [email protected] 65 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Heliboard which is an active fork of OpenBoard.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I've been using Heliboard for a while. It does most that gboard does, but the predictions aren't as good of course.

[–] Static_Rocket 5 points 7 hours ago

Yeah, I've been using it for about a year now. It's a little frustrating that it will learn my misspellings before it suggests a proper replacement, but otherwise I have no complaints. Direct upgrade over the stock AOSP keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 19 hours ago

ive been using heliboard for a while now. no complaints.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

Florisboard beta is what I use. Extremely customisable. I think the biggest things that lacks are custom background photo and text-gliding (I ~dont use any of these though).

I made it almost identical to the gboard theme I was using previously and it's so cool.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

I like HeliBoard. It automatically switches between the languages I write in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

How do you make it switch automatically?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I just start writing in the different language and the suggestions + autocorrect switch for me. All the languages (other than Korean) use the same keyboard layout and for the umlauts I need to hold the aoeu shortly to get the right umlaut, or I just rely on the autocorrect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 minutes ago* (last edited 4 minutes ago)

Back to heliboard. I found the setting. In the languages selection, it seems it is only a toggle and to get the menu you need to long press. That needs to be fixed and put the multi language option outside.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Thanks, but couldn't get it to work. These all fuss about futo decided to check it out, and all languages are working fine. The predictions are also better.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t know, but Thumb-Key is written to by a core Lemmy developer, dessalines.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

what a fantastic way to indicate my turbo nerd status to my friends and family!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I love the fulliness of unexpected keyboard

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Unexpected keyboard is just the best!

screenshot of the unexpected keyboard while writing this response

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

Which lemmy client is this? It looks very nice

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