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

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[–] BitSound@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] xvlc@feddit.de 20 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] folkrav@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] vaselined@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

https://github.com/Helium314/openboard/releases

Openboard fork with swipe typing

[–] folkrav@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Iiiinteresting. Will test that out. Thanks!

Edit: works great! Thank you so much.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 4 points 1 year ago

Note that this fork relies on the proprietary Google library to do this. It's not really an alternative.

[–] spez@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Didn't know they did releases. Thank you!

[–] TheSun@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You should give AnySoftKeyboard a spin. Has word suggestions that are really good and the swiping works really well too

[–] folkrav@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I kind of dismissed it as the project looks more or less dead on GH...

[–] furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago

makes want to learn kotlin, so i could contribute