Since yesterday, the really cool fork of openboard with active development and support of adding a swype library manually, got rebranded into Heliboard. A release on izzyondroidrepo and fdroid should be coming soon.
PS. If you are using the old fork you have to remove it first and do a backup of your settings.
I want to use one of these OSS keyboards, but man they suck a lot for non-English typing… and especially if you want/need multiple languages!
I use it for English and German. And it works great.
This was what kept me on Microsoft’s keyboard for ages, I’ve been using using this fork for the past month or two and it’s by far the best FOSS keyboard for multilingual typing and autocorrect. Maybe not quite as polished as GBoard or SwiftKey but more than good enough.
I really suggest you give it a try! I admit setting up the multilingual support is slightly convoluted compared to proprietary options, though. This comment was typed on Heliboard, et je peux facilement changer en français aussi and even avoir des sentences that changent between les deux without beaucoup de difficulté.
Interesting! I’ll give it more time then! Thanks!
I use it for Spanish and it works perfectly, what language are you trying?
Agree. And this is the first OSS keyboard I’ve found that can do multiple languages at the same time without switching the language/layout. (You can set secondary language) It requires a bit of setup (like downloading dictionaries) but I’d suggest to give it a try.
I had to stop using it for English even because its word predictions were horrible. Very common words kept correcting to much less common words on a regular basis. I gave it a good three months and I just can’t do it. Wanted to like it so much.
Removed by mod
How does it compare to floris board ?
Same question, floris board came the cloests to replacing non-FOSS keybaords for me.
The main reason I didn’t switch yet was the lack of word suggestions / autocorrect. We rely on it so much
Other things that would be nice to have:
- a more ‘clicky’ feeling on keypress, similar to Google Keyboard (not sure how hard that would be to implement)
- support for inserting gifs, so that I don’t have to use the sticker/gif menu in the apps themselves
- Built in translations, maybe even done locally. It’s really cool being able to type something in English, such as in a game, and having it send in another language. I’ve used it way more than I thought I would
You are tapping on a piece of glass. What is a “clicky feeling”? Vibration, or a popup?
The vibration pretty much
I just took a look at FlorisBoard again, and it looks like there are settings to change the vibration intensity and length. Setting it to the highest intensity and lowest length brought things very close.
A tiny difference I noticed that I could live without
- google keyboard vibrates both when the key is pressed down, and when it is released
- Floris only vibrates on keypress
For what it’s worth, long press special characters on google keyboard dont vibrate on release, which I think is silly. It should always do that (maybe even having some lighter vibration feedback when a special character is used)
I found that the Pixel 7 pro finally got close to an iphone 8 in terms of realistic haptic vibrations. The 6a doesnt work with florisboards “define vibration yourself” though.
So in general useful haptic vibrations like on iphones where just never there. Not sure about other brands but all android phones I had had unrealistic vibrations.
I initially used FlorisBoard, but I changed to OpenBoard for the automatic corrections. As far as I know, FlorisBoard can only underline errors in red, then you have to tap the word and select which option it should be. On OpenBoard, a correction is made automatically, and it’s quite accurate!
I actually prefere the way Floris Board handles word correction. I wish for a more complete and reliable way to word suggestion with an actual build-in dictionnary with definition, synonyms, collocation, antonymes… Would actually improve my English :/.
Auto-correction is cool and all, but IMO we shouldn’t relie to much on that.
*Rely 🤣. It’s true, but for me it’s just much faster to have auto-correction, I usually know how words should be written, but I hit the wrong letter quite often, so that’s why this works for me.
Has equivalent “clipboard & text manipulation” features but no real internal clipboard which is security critical.
I always prefer florisboard for the size control and typing, its just best. But HeliBoard is already way better than Openboard from my looks.
Why security critical?
Any foreground app can read the clipboard on Android. Androids clipboard only stores the last entry, so such clipboard histories in keyboard apps will be in the internal app storage. But as Openboard has no dedicated “copy only to internal clipboard” you have no protection really.
Got it, thanks!
Damn, there are no FOSS glide typing libs, that explains the lack of options with FOSS keyboards.
I think it must be really hard to implement something that translates a bunch of seemingly random vectors to the closest resembling word.
It’s a bit like T9 typing but in reverse. You do an isolation of which words can be constructed out of every key your finger slides over, assign higher weight to the ones where sharp turns or longer dwell times were, and then take the most statistically likely result, and suggest the next 3 possible results in the top bar.
very nice! i’ve been using the fork for a while now, and it’s been rock solid. glad to see it will be available on fdroid soon.
Why was it forked? Is the original no longer being developed?
It hasnt been for a quite a bit of time already. Like over a year I think at this point.
A very fine keyboard, especially for multilingual typing.
I’ve failed to get that to work. How do you actually get additional languages?
press on the downloaded language and set a secondary dictionary.
It doesn’t really work that well. I tried with my native Romanian + English… It’s frustrating to get it to write sentences that include one work from a different language than the one you started typing.
Really? Maybe it works better for some languages than others, but the majority of what I type on my phone (outside Lemmy) is in Frenglish and Heliboard handles it really well. Have you tried switching which one is set as the primary language? With the most recent update, I was having issues until I changed my primary language to French and the secondary to English.
Oh, well… Maybe it depends on the languages. I’m using it with IT, ES, and EN and it does the job. BTW, maybe you need to download the dictionary?
Just installed it. Adjusted the settings to my liking. Very nice. Like OpenBoard, but has quite a lot of extras by comparison. Thanks for the tip.
