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Comment by rom1v | Hacker News Reader

What are private and open source keyboards on Android?

I use [OpenBoard](https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/org.dslul.openboard.inputmet...), but there is no update since 2022 (it works well though).

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Unexpected keyboard [^1] has been a game changer for me. As far as I know, it's the only full-size keyboard that features swiping towards the corners of keys for numbers and special characters instead of tapping and holding. As a bonus, it weighs in at under a megabyte.

Edit: another comment mentioned Thumb-Key [^2], which has a similar swipe feature.

[^1]: https://f-droid.org/packages/juloo.keyboard2/ [^2]: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

I'm quite happy with FlorisBoard, though initial configuration was a bit annoying. https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard

Heliboard works really great, but for swiping you need to manually add Google's lib (which I did), and support for alternative language layouts is very basic (if that's something you need).

Oh, thank you. https://alternativeto.net/software/heliboard/about/

> HeliBoard is a fork of OpenBoard, continuing the project from where it stopped.

Futo keyboard has much better word prediction

It's nice, but I've gotten too used to seeing the long-press keys in my previous keyboards, and having a number row. Let's see how the layout for other languages (mainly Japanese) shake out though.

That was the first thing I enabled. The option to show the symbols isn't the bottom of the theme settings

Interesting. Still no number row, but much better. And having voice input integrated means that I can remove the dedicated app. Still really just missing Japanese keyboard layout support.

There's a separate option for the number row but it's on a different page

Yeah I eventually saw it.

The whole area is shockingly underdeveloped. For instance there is no open source keyboard that supports pinyin chinese input. Some very low hanging fruit...

This open source android keyboard supports pinyin Chinese input: https://github.com/osfans/trime

Same for Vietnamese Telex, I think there's only one fork of openboard supporting it...

How often does a keyboard need to be updated, really?

At least as often as old Android API versions being dropped.

More realistically, as often as bugs are identified and patched.

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