If you just want to distance yourself from Google, give OpenBoard a try. It’s GBoard without the G. It’s been working just the same for me, except for some reason it spontaneously decided to stop automatically capitalizing “I”.

Yep. Much as I hate to say it, GBoard just feels good in a way that none of the other major swipe keyboards have for me.

GBoard without internet access is good compromise for me.

I agree. I’ve tried so many FOSS keyboards and no matter how hard I try, I just have to go back to gboard. It’s wild how hard it is to find a good keyboard. I can’t even use the stock Samsung one anymore

Same, I scrolled too far to find another gboard user lol.

I currently use gboard with network permissions toggled off. You can do this on Graphene and Calyx or install a firewall app like NetGuard.

https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/

I’m on AnySoft, but it’s not perfect, and I gotta say that the onscreen keyboard situation for Android was one of my biggest unexpected disappointments when moving to the platform. What I’d expected was that there’d be one FOSS keyboard that would be incredibly configurable and take over, but everything seems to significantly lack in some ways:

• Some keyboards aren’t great when it comes to arrow keys/control keys/other keys useful in Termux or ConnectBot to Linux systems.

• Lack of keyboards that provide a straightforward way for users to create their own bindings. The ability to resize and relocate keys and to assign tap/hold/swipe bindings to individual keys seems like it’d be straightforward to me, but it doesn’t seem to be a thing. I mean, why can’t I remove a key that I don’t use or want (say, the “mic” key if I don’t use that functionality) and add my own key. Even better, my own modifier keys a la Shift to add more functionality to the other keys?

• Some keyboards don’t have typo correction. My accuracy on onscreen keyboards on a phone-size screen isn’t good enough for me to really operate without that. I really wish that typo correction was an external program that the keyboard program could just plug into, so that this gets solved once and every new keyboard developer doesn’t have to deal with reimplementing this.

• Unicode input. I mean, we have this incredibly rich character set these days. Most on-screen keyboards seem to let one choose a language and to make it easy to input the common characters in that language, akin to a traditional physical keyboard. And they often provide for some common extensions to that, like superscript characters. And for some reason, a lot provide emoji support, though damned if I can see how that’s essential other than maybe on something like traditional Twitter, where character count is artificially-constrained. But support for inputting Unicode seems to be remarkably limited. On desktop computers, I’m used to using emacs, which has a ton of arbitrary input methods for inputting characters. I can use various mechanisms that do things like ^2 becomes “²” or lets you search by name for Unicode characters (C-x 8 RET and then a tab-completable and searchable DIVISION SIGN becomes “÷”) or lets you use TeX sequences (\rightarrow becomes “→”), lets you input Unicode characters by codepoint, or a zillion other things and lets you switch among them as is convenient. An on-screen Android keyboard could do all that and unlike emacs has the ability to manipulate the actual keyboard in front of a user and could leverage “long press” and the like, but nothing like that actually exists.

• Chording seems remarkably underused. I mean, you’ve got the ability to detect multiple finger presses, but it doesn’t really seem to be exploited. I get that one-hand use is a thing, but I’d think that there’d be at least a toggle between one-hand and two-hand use to be able to leverage that.

• The “drag on spacebar to move the cursor” isn’t offered in AnySoft and some other keyboards, which seems like a reasonable way to deal with cursor movement where one doesn’t have the precision of a mouse.

• No macro support. I mean, okay, in the absence of fully-configurable keys, I’d have at least expected some limited ability to assign user-specified snippets of text to some menu or keys.

• No external editor support. For some long chunks of text – like, say, Markdown on kbin/lemmy – I’d just as soon use one of the various dedicated Markdown editors than the in-browser editor.

I have to keep pitching OpenBoard with Gesture typing because it combines the best from OB and FB (and GB I guess) and it saved my sanity

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Same. I missed swiping at first, but it was getting so unreliable that I think I’m better off now that I’m getting used to it. It fixes my two major annoyances with the AOSP keyboard, though: occasionally losing suggestions until clearing cache and force restarting, and no suggestions in search fields.

Once you get used to swiping backspace to delete, and swiping space to move the cursor, it’s hard to switch to anything else.

I see the Florisboard has similar features, plus a nice toolbar. Are there any bugs or security issues preventing it from being used?

I’ve tried so many other keyboard, but stick with SwiftKey because of the swiping punctuation next to the space bar. I just can’t get used to anything else.

I wholeheartedly agree with the swiping punctuation. That and swiping on the space bar to switch keyboard configuration is the main reason for sticking to SwiftKey. Writing in several languages where you need special characters in each language, having to hold down a button in order to switch the keyboard is frustratingly slow.

One extra point is also that SwiftKey inserts the most likely prediction when clicking space. Whenever I’ve used gboard, it’s so frustrating, that my fingers have to click the prediction in order to insert it.

How’s the gesture recognition accuracy? I long for the days of swype but gboard is the only one that’s come close to me.

Hahaha, this is me. Nailed it.

I’m trapped by swipe to delete. I know others have it but with limitations like swipe from the backspace key. Years of swiping left anywhere on the keyboard to delete a word has made it impossible to use anything else.

Kinda unfortunate it hasn’t been updated for a very long while.

Hey yo I also type 50/50 in Japanese and English and came here wondering if there were any Gboard alternatives out there yet.

How do you disable internet access for Gboard?

Coming from SwiftKey, I’m trying Gboard just now,but how fo you survive that it doesn’t support auto-space after punctuation in anything but US English? I have Danish as my layout, with English as the second language.

It’ll for sure take me some time to get used to.

I miss SwiftKey’s long press to delete a word (though the swipe left from backspace might be learned, and elike the easy access to parentheses)

It messes with me that the word that’ll be inserted when I press space is not always the middle suggestion.

It annoys me that I can’t get rid of the mic button, despite having disabled voice.

Aside from the useless features overkill, I still think SwiftKey is the best Android keyboard. I ignore 90% of the stuff they implement. Quite frankly I am almost unable to type quick without it.

SwiftKey does your first two bullets and has full on Bing chatgpt built into the keyboard including getting it to compose messages for you and gives you options to rewrite your messages in different tones like professional, casual, funny, etc.

I feel like most of your issues with swiftkey could be fixed by playing around around with themes/settings a bit to find what fits your needs.