I’m trying to build my own degoogled ROM for me, so what are you suggesting? For now I’m on OpenBoard.
Used OpenBoard, but switched to Florisboard because OpenBoard seems abandoned and the developer of FlorisBoard came back with an update of what he’s working on. So far I’m not mad, the lack of autocorrect did make my typing much better. But as a dyslectic person I can’t wait for proper autocorrect to be implemented.
Using FCITX5 for Asian languages.
Definitely Florisboard as it has the most features and best theming support but I was using AnySoftKeyboard in the past and it’s okay too.
I second FlorisBoard due to gesture typing even though it’s got room for improvement. Couldn’t get gesture to work reliably with AnySoft.
Now if Florisboard had kaomoji and gifs like Gboard, it’d be perfect (╥﹏╥ )
There’s a gesture tying (swipe) fork of open board as well which is simply brilliant: https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard. The problem with FlorisBoard for now is the lack of autocorrect.
Just installed and tested it. Not bad, I must say. Is it still in development? Last update was Sept. 2022
I giggled over the individual keys for
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and ┻━┻.It’s dependent on the main OpenBoard repo, whenever there’s a new release there, this dev rebases it and provides a new release on his repo. OpenBoard hasn’t been seeing much activity unfortunately, the last commit was 6 months ago. So nothing here as well. I’m eagerly waiting for FlorisBoard to implement autocorrect, I’ll probably switch as soon as it’s out. Floris is more customizable and there’s even an active MR to support Material You theming which will make it look right at home on Android 12+.
AnySoftKeyboard
Thumb-Key is aiming to be a FOSS replacement to the now unmaintained MessageEase. Like MessageEase, it offers a 3x3 touch-and-swipe layout. It takes time to learn, but allows to type fast and accurately, thus getting rid of the dependence on prediction/auto-correction, without which QWERTY on small touchscreens would be unusable. Many people report typing more than 50 WPM on MessageEase and the same should be possible with Thumb-Key. It’s a young project and is still missing many features and gestures of MessageEase, but it is active and has a community here at thumbkey@lemmy.ml.
I only recently switched from GBoard to MessageEase and ThumbKey, and I still around 25 WPM, but I found that I stopped making mistakes when typing out the long master password for my password manage on my phone, because this is one of the areas where auto-correct couldn’t help.
But I am still far away from reaching the speeds of swiping on a QWERTY-keyboard without word prediction. So if you don’t mind that and don’t want to spend your free time learning alternative layouts, stick to QWERTY layouts, but if you want a keyboard layout to type exactly what you want, try one of these 3x3 boards. To be honest, if you want to give it a shot, out of the two I would probably still recommend MessageEase, as Thumb-Key is very alpha, but that might change. I have both with the same layout and switch back and forth.
I am using OpenBoard as well. There even is a fork with gesture typing for the adventurous.
Hacker’s Keyboard. The only keyboard I’ll ever use on Android.
It hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years though. It uses a very old API so it’s slightly buggy.
I’ve been using Unexpected Keyboard lately instead. It’s the only modern keyboard I’ve found that has stuff like control and function keys. It uses swiping on keys to get more characters though, so it takes some getting used to. I had to set the swipe distance higher so I don’t have as many typos.