HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it's been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I'm really really happy and grateful for these tools. ๐
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
318 points (97.6% liked)
Open Source
29773 readers
730 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Just in case I'm asked, here's the basics steps to get it going:
- I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
- I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
- Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked "load gesture library" and selected the downloaded swipe library
- And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it's free and offline, but not FOSS.
That's it.
Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:
How do you get your microphone option in the top right corner like that. Mine only shows up under the toolbar menu, after hitting the arrow key (top left corner)
You can tap and hold on the microphone button to pin it to the right.
This is a hot tip!
Exactly this. You can pin several functions this way.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(10 replies)
This is the definitive replacement for gboard, people. It works fantastically well already with everything that Gboard has and it will only get better from here on.
Does it have multiple layouts support (Latin, Cyrillic), swipe typing and clipboard history?
Idk about layouts but swipe is available if you look into it, you just need to download a file to load the it into the keyboard and yes on clipboard history
load more comments
(1 replies)
Great piece of software!
I second this
It's really great to see a continuation of Openboard.
Still waiting for Japanese support. At the moment the only decent Japanese keyboard on Android are either GBoard or Microsoft one unfortunately.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Why do they always tell you it's the successor of whatever, but never what it is for?
load more comments
(3 replies)
This update somehow has broken haptic feedback on my keyboard ๐ค
TLDR: Why do I stop using OpenBoard and use this instead :)?
Some new features, bug fixes, and ongoing support.
~~It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh - don't switch until you have a bit of spare time.~~ Missed the back and restore button in settings.
Personally I'm on one of the fork's beta versions. I'm waiting for the f-droid release so I get updates.
It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh
You can import your OpenBoard settings
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
It has swipe typing plus a lot of other new features/theme customisation that openboard didn't have.
Swiping
Looks nice but I wish the clipboard history could be based on number of items and not just time.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Been using this for about 3 months or so. The one piece missing is good swipe word recognition - its really poor compared to Gboard even after this amount of time. I spend more time correcting words than I saved nor typing them. Used swipe with Gboard for many years previously so I know hope swipe works.
Any suggestions on how to improve it?
I have found this to be the case as well.
What it has forced me to do now is to actually try to be close to the letters. When I'm swiping with gboard, I was very sloppy and it would recognize what I wrote. At this point, I'm fine being more accurate for the tradeoff.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Is this better in any way tohan florisboard? I've been using it (florisboard) for a year now and had no problems and have loved its features (especially the text navigation arrows and clipboard history).
Been looking for a decent keyboard app, gonna try this out for sure ๐
What happened to OpenBoard?
Development ceased.
Using it since version 14.1, as far as I remember but since then, I was finally able to replace gboard. Heli is really awesome. I always believed that florisboard will be my gboard replacement but for non-english swipe users nothing really changed or improved for years and then heli came out of the blue. Of course, it's still a compromise compared to gboard and it probably always will be but to me it reached a point where this is minimal.
Yesterday I found out about the experimental dictionaries and imported them. Let's see if there will be visible improvement. Does anyone have more experience with those dictionaries?
load more comments
(6 replies)
Any idea when it's going to be available in fdroid?
Does not use internet permission, and thus is 100% offline.
Does the AOSP keyboard access internet?
view more: next โบ