OpenBoard

Its the best open source keyboard :)

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

I come from years of using SwiftKeys, both before and after Microsoft acquisition. I started wanting to change after noticing that SwiftKeys systematically crashed when opening big files (I initially thought it was the editor's fault or the Android OS limitation, but no, it was the keyboard!). So I decided to change for a FLOSS alternative.

One of my main condition was that it needed to support Colemak, which I consider one of the fastest layout to type on mobile. I tried all available keyboards, and long story short, OpenBoard is the best one hands down as of September 2023, by far. The only contenders are FlorisBoard and The Hacker's Keyboard, but they both lack word correction/prediction.

OpenBoard does not seem special on the first try, but after weeks of continuous use, I noticed some incredible hidden features, for example :

• the possibility to hold the spacebar to move the cursor left and right, same for holding the backspace key to delete not just one character but a precise selection by swiping,
• that on the special characters page, you can hold keys even if there is no hint that it is possible, you will get the other characters you can also get more slowly by going to the second page of special characters,
• that the clipboard history is configurable so that you can retain copied text for up to 120 min instead of the default 20min

And I forget others but already you can see that a lot of thoughts were given to user ergonomy.

It does not support swiping unfortunately, but it does support words prediction and correction, and is multilingual (but contrary to SwiftKey it does not support multiple languages simultaneously, you have to switch to the language you want to be able to correct, but it's very fast there is a language switch key just on the left of the spacebar).

And best of all, it can handle huge text files! Since I switched, I can write notes of seemingly infinite length in Markor (an opensource Markdown notes editor). And it's always fast, whereas for big documents, SwiftKey (when it could still handle the big but not enormous documents) would be VERY slow to open and react to inputs with big delays, on the other hand OpenBoard is always incredibly fast.

So I can only recommend this awesome keyboard with lots of support for various languages and layouts, and the only FLOSS one with corrections/predictions support.

/EDIT: Since first writing this review, I came across a more up to date fork that is still being currently developed by one of the original devs, and it implements a LOT of new features, including much improved dictionaries and true multilanguage dictionaries (eg we can combine german and english or any other pair!), emojis and math symbols dictionaries (ie, can predict emojis from raw text!) and it also supports swiping using the Google's proprietary implementation (because no opensource implementation exists currently). So I strongly recommend using the actively maintained fork: https://github.com/Helium314/openboard

It's a good privacy keyboard, but not better than Gboard (firewalled from internet), and it's 3-5x as large as other privacy keyboards.

Currently the best FOSS keyboard, followed closely by florisboard. This one is missing swipe type and automatic language selection to be perfect

A great privacy alternative to Gboard!