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:
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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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.
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.
... wait, you guys live without undo button??
- HeliBoard 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.
Same here
- FUTO gang
A good reminder to stop using gboard. Others have pointed to alternatives. Heliboard is another FOSS option that's had this for years.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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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.
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Haha florisboard already had that
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.
It took a year and a half to develop an "undo" feature? WTF is happening at Google?
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
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 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
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About time.
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