Privacy Guides @lemmy.one Chestrade @lemmy.world 11 mo. ago

What is a good private keyboard for android

I have tried a few private keyboards, but none of them had the possibility to have one layout (Qwerty) with two correction languages (English and French). Any suggestions?

39 comments

FlorisBoard is by far the best of all open source keyboards I've tried.
- Have they added spell check yet? I love it, but I need a keyboard that can spellchwck and autocorrect...
  
  I'm leaving that typo in there to make my point.
  
  When I enable the spellchecker systemwide, it says "unknown / null" in the spellchecker settings. So I'm guessing not. I never use any spellchecker myself so I wouldn't know if there is something else to install.
  
  I guess not: there is a big red box in the settings saying "Suggestions (except autofill) are not available in this release".
I just saw another post about this on !android@lemdro.id and I'm now using OpenBoard with Gesture Typing - it has everything I want from GBoard in a FOSS app!
- After reading your post, I went check it out and you were right: it's friggin brilliant. In fact, I'm typing this with it at this very moment.
  
  Thank you Sir!
- This is nice, but no swipe ?
  
  It does have gesture/swipe typing, that's the whole point!
I usually just change keyboard altogether when switching between languages. for example, japanese is so different from English that the same keyboard wouldn't even make sense.

I am looking for a FOSS keyboard that supports typing by finger swiping though, as that's the only comfortable way to type for me, but so far I haven't found any. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
- Have you tried florisboard or anysoftkeyboard?
  
  Thanks, I tried them out just now. Florisboard doesn't seem to have typing by swiping but AnySoftKeyboard definitely does, so I'll use it for now. A tiny bit buggy but i reckon it will improve with time since it is currently experimental. (It was called gesture-typing in AnySoftKeyboard)
AnySoftKeyboard is flexible enough for bilingual (or trilingual or +) use. For qwerty with french, you have to choose Canadian French 🤷

i installed open board for a monolingual friend who uses azerty
- I tried that one. You have to manually switch between the languages to get the corresponding autocorrect. I need a multilingual qwerty keyboard
  
  long press the Enter key, choose "override default dictionary", and pick the languages to merge.
Openboard fork with gestures is excellent. That's what I'm using after giving up Gboard.

Edit: link - https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/releases/tag/v1.4.5-gesture-typing
- Can you please link to where you got that fork with gestures?
  
  You can download it here: https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/releases/tag/v1.4.5-gesture-typing
OpenBoard is my go-to Android keyboard.
- How good is the autocorrect on it? I tried it a while back and it was very very bad compared to Gboard, so I had to switch back? Has it improved at all these days (past year), or is there perhaps some way to improve it? That's the only thing keeping me on Gboard.
Im using now florisboard, its beta now and correction is experimental, but its seen to be very well made and its FOSS
Permanently Deleted
Florisboard or Simple Keyboard
I use AnySoftKeyboard
Maybe florisboard?
- It's nice but it doesn't have an auto correct. I need that for my fat thumbs
  
  Ah yeah. I think it's in the works but yeah i feel you
- I want to like florisboard but it is lacking so much. For example, of I want to use gesture typing, I can't have it capitalize the word "I". I have tried switching to the beta multiple times, but never last more than a few hours because of small things like that.
openboard and florisboard for more customization.
I ditched traditional keyboards and got Thumb-key, now I can just have my keyboard in Spanish all the time
- what do you mean by "thumb-key"? when i search, i see custom hardware keyboards
  
  edit 1 found it: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
  
  i have to read more about this, and try for some time to learn
  
  edit 2 it's so awkward to use. Do you use only one thumb or both? Where are the predictions?
  
  passing from 10 fingers to 2 is already a handicap. sometimes i put my screen on a surface to use the keyboard like a 'real' keyboard with 10 fingers. a thumb-key is torture for me 😬
  
  how is your speed with this layout? did you test it?
  
  Hello, typing this from my backup account. 1 or 2 thumbs, I do two thumbs. There are no predictions. I'm a very slow regardless of the keyboard lol so I didn't test speed

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