I came across everyday topic on Techlore Discussions about free and open source keyboards for Android and discovered this little gem. It is FlorisBoard, a virtual keyboard for Android which respects privacy of the user. I can sigh with relief and finish my search for that singular keyboard for typing stuff on the go.
It has everything I need and more.
- Multilanguage support: detailed layout options, popular presets
- Swift and glide typing experience
- Customizable gestures: switch language by fast swiping the keyboard itself left and right, change case by swiping up, the infamous cursor swipe on space bar
- Emojis
- Clipboard
- Smartbar: quick actions and clipboard cursor tools
- One-handed mode
- Other look-and-feel settings
Oh neat. Development had died down, but looks like it’s picking back up again and the creator is finding more maintainers. It’s what I use on my phone.
Here, the developer explained why development activity decreased:
While it is true that due to private reasons I had to take a bit of a pause of developing FlorisBoard and some time passed with no progress at all, implementing a completely new statistical NLP (Natural Language Processing) provider, or in laymans terms the long-awaited word prediction and spell-checking implementation, is also a huge task which takes a lot of time and trial-error and development time.
Yeah I had given up on the project and had settled on OpenBoard for now, but if/when the word suggestions ever land, I’ll gladly jump over. I don’t dislike OpenBoard per se, it’s actually pretty decent, reminds me of older AOSP when it was a bit more naive, but I really miss swipe typing.
https://github.com/Helium314/openboard/releases
Openboard fork with swipe typing
Iiiinteresting. Will test that out. Thanks!
Edit: works great! Thank you so much.
Didn’t know they did releases. Thank you!
You should give AnySoftKeyboard a spin. Has word suggestions that are really good and the swiping works really well too
I kind of dismissed it as the project looks more or less dead on GH…
It was abandoned for almost a year, glad to see commits picking up again. Though the latest beta/stable releases are still incredibly outdated and broken, so not really in a usable state with the incomplete auto correct.
The other problem with FOSS keyboards is that development always dies off with no more updates.
This makes it a non starter for me
There are a lot of “open source enthusiasts”, but not enough “open source contributors”
Exactly because the thing is FOSS, that becomes possible for more people with enough qualifications to resume it. In proprietary case, only very limited circle gets to touch the source code. We’re probably witnessing a curse with virtual keyboards in FOSS, like some niche kinds of software…
FlorisBoard kinda died off for a year as patrickgold tried to implement statistical NLP suggestions. Thankfully, quite recently he opened up developments for contributors and people looking to help with the project on a long-term basis.
Why are the versions of FlorisBoard and OpenBoard, available on F-Droid so old? I really don’t like to download important apps from a github release page and keep everything updated manually…
Check out Obtainium
F-Droid has the most up-to-date versions (v0.3.16 and v1.4.5). Both of these just haven’t seen a release in a while, although the FlorisBoard developer seems to have recently returned.
Swipe typing is not great. I come back to it every few months to try it again and always end up frustrated. It’s good if you are a tap typer, though.
Swipe typing is brutal
I’ve been using it for a couple years now. It’s been a good experience, and it works completely as a keyboard. Customization is great, and there are a lot of implemented features thay have made it my go-to Android keyboard.
I switched from Gboard since I wanted to use an open source alternative for something as simple as a keyboard. It works fine as a basic keyboard, although its a bit unpolished otherwise. Swipe typing is buggy and there hasn’t been many updates recently. I don’t expect a ton from an open source keyboard to begin with, but this one provides a lot and could be even better if it starts being developed often again. It feels unfinished in its current state.
It used to have text suggestions, but now they are gone for me. Not sure what happened. I’d have to check again, but I’m not sure if they were taken out a while back or something.
Flawed, but it its awesome to have an open source keyboard with this much capability.
Adios gboard !
Genuine question: is there any way for any keyboard application to be privacy disrespecting if their internet access is blocked off by a firewall?
May try it out if I can get over the fact that I won’t have multi language support without switching manually anymore. I’ve been trying to move away from SwiftKey, but as someone who typed regularly in 3 (occasionally 4) languages and switches between them quite a lot, it’s a feature that I’m not sure I can live without. So far I haven’t seen any FOSS keyboards supporting multi language in such a seamless way.
Does it do emoji predictions? I’ve got a few relationships that use a lot of emoji in chats, and the ability tomjusy type ‘salute’, ‘sad’, ‘kiss’ etc and get the emoji without scrolling through a library is what’s keeping me on Swiftkey.
Looks great! I love how customizable it is.
Some features that I still like having though include the built in translation and gifs with google keyboard.
But that’s pretty much it at this point, everything else is so solid. I might switch over soon
Why not just Simple Keyboard?
