I've used Unexpected Keyboard and FlorisBoard and I'd say that they're great introductory FOSS apps for most users (users inexperienced to sudden changes)

Unexpected Keyboard uses Nix in their codebase :D
Thumb-Key is maintained by dessalines whom is a Lemmy dev
Florisboard is starting to convert their codebase to Rust,
- literally their commit to main yesterday:
  
  "Switch native code to Rust"
so this is pretty awesome to see!!

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[–] Daxter101@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Whoo, since you're here, can I ask, does any of these (or others) have swipe-typing? And since you've used these, are they good?

Any better features than gboard? (Apart from the obvious data stealing)

Any gripes?

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago

Heliboard is currently the most reliable swiper.

You have to load the library for that separately, but it makes it very easy to do.

As far as features that gboard doesn't have, the main one for heliboard is that you can edit the secondary characters. That's pretty damn nice. For one, it means you can set it up to mirror the secondary layout of any keyboard you're used to, reducing any swtich caused learning curve. For another, if you want to roll your own entirely, it's super easy to do, even easier than multilingo, which is the only other editable keyboard I'm aware of.

Gripes? Honestly, only that it isn't a copy kid Swype, my preferred keyboard. It can get close, but it isn't exactly the same. It'll r be what I switch to if I ever have to give up swype.

[–] dracs@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

I just started using Heliboard yesterday. It doesn't offer its own swipe typing library. But you can give it the library file from GBoard (link on their github) and it'll use that to enable it.

[–] recursive_recursion@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

For gestures/swipe-typing I do know that all 3 have that feature
unfortunately I can't provide reviews on it as I still tap to type, haven't had time to retrain unfortunately

For Florisboard's features I really like their sea of options for customizability:

it gives me Arch Linux vibes as it give you plenty to fiddle around with like:
hinted symbols/number row, built-in Incognito mode, undo&redo, built-in dev tool toggles, customizations backup&restore, etc
gripes wise is wanting remap keys but this is such an insignificant gripe considering all the features they've implemented
- I'd imagine that this is a potential feature down the far future

For Unexpected Keyboard, the features it provided was actually unexpected:

like I didn't expect to get a Ctrl, Fn, ESC button, like wtf that's pretty awesome!
it also has a single button arrow d-pad!
essentially this has all the keys on a desktop keyboard
gripes wise I wish there was a language indicator for when I'm switching between dvorak, qwerty, and Korean
- this is also a very small nitpick that will probably get implemented later on

I haven't used Thumb-Keys but I've seen good reviews about it so it's worth a shot as well 👍