I use AnysoftKeyboard (on F-Droid) [1]. I's pretty good, but has issues with the French apostrophe, that's often used to combine words.
It also has multiple keyboard layouts, of which "terminal" compares favorably to hacker's keyboard. I like that it is configurable, and has a lot of text editing tools when swiping space up.
I admit I lost some typing speed when I switched from the alternatives, but I'm happier with it.
I just now figured I’d try AnySoftKeyboard. Its stock behaviour seems a little weird in places, but I’ll try it for a while and see how it goes. But the real thing that’s annoying me is how uncompromisingly huge it is. Its default behaviour has it consuming a shade under two thirds of the available screen space on my not-inordinately-large phone, compared with under half on the Samsung keyboard in its compact (reduced-height) mode. You can control the height of the top row (and it’s compact by default), but can’t control the height of the rest (other than by going to a theme that consumes even more space)? I want to eliminate the wasted ~30px at the bottom, and shrink each row by around 20px. I can easily save 100px here without removing anything.
I agree it's a bit big, I tend to configure my keyboards to use the minimal size. That said, there are multiple themes to pick from, and some are smaller than others. You could conceivably make your own, though I have never tried.
Edit: thanks a lot
aasasd, I had just spent a few minutes looking for it (again), without finding it.
I don't see any reason why someone would use OpenBoard over AnySoftKeyboard. It would of been nice if there was an explanation of what differentiated it. If someone just wanted a different looking keyboard they could just have created a new theme for AnySoftKeyboard.
AnySoftKeyboard also is the only open source keyboard for Android that has gesture typing. Which is something I grew to love from when I used Gboard.
I think the search function is working fine, the app is just called "AnySoftKeyboard 3D Theme" in the F-Droid app but not on the website for some reason.
With all default repos + IzzyOnDroid enabled and searching exactly for that package name I get all the language packs and a 7 years old PC theme, but not the app itself. I'll just download the APK, I guess.
It shows up for me on GrapheneOS. I don't think the F-Droid search is OS-dependent anyways besides maybe the major Android version number. As the GP noted, for some reason the name is listed with the "3D Theme" addendum in the app which is a little bizarre. Does your browser support opening the link in an app, i.e. F-Droid?
Swyping didn't work reliably when I tried one year ago, so I switched back to one of the keyboards of my phone (SwiftKey because I find it slightly better than Samsung's one.) Did they improve it in the last releases?
There is a pull request open which improves the algorithm massively. Author couldn't finish it because of health issues sadly.
I've installed it on my phone and it works great but I had to update some parameters in the code so it'd work.
I'm not sure if they improved it or it just works more reliably with the default theme. But about a year ago it was unusable but now I'm able to use it with only occasional errors.
Of course it's still not as good as Gboard, but I'd rather put up with the slight inconvenience for it being open source.
Alas ASK could use an influx of developer efforts. Menny Even-Danan seems to be the sole developer (aside from some pull requests), and it looks like other stuff is keeping him busy lately—as in, in the past couple years at least.
I keep being perplexed when people reinvent software instead of joining forces (though I'm fine either way if the result is good). A better swipe-typing algorithm would be great, but even some smaller touches would make ASK much nicer: like, don't add a space after an opening parenthesis when swiping. Not rocket science, but needs someone to dig in the app's workings.
I second the AnySoftKeyboard. It is nice alternative, however I miss the mode that resembles BlackBerry 10 keyboard, especially in case of autocompletion suggestions that popped over specific letter and I had to swipe it up [0] in order to complete the word. It was many times more pleasant to use than the "selection bar".
AnySoftKeyboard on the surface seems cool, however, they've overloaded it with unnecessary characters. When I tried it, I had English selected and yet somehow it has characters that are _never_ used in English. That's not necessarily an issue, but when non-English characters are easier to type than English characters, it decreases my typing speed significantly. I raised an issue about it and was quickly dismissed. I've stuck to SwiftKey since. I'll have to try OpenBoard!
ASK has one Keyboard layout that includes cursor keys, tab/ctrl/pipe and forward slash. Very handy for termux and to move the cursor around which i also use all the time.
There's also the copy paste popup that can be activated by swiping up on the space bar which offers a nice cursor based highlight/copy/paste mode.
I love AnysoftKeyboard but it completely freezes once every few days when pressing the emoji key. Forcing me to reboot my phone. Which is quite annoying to say the least.
Just as a workaround: you can stop the app without rebooting the phone. The full app list is probably not accessible, but you can go via the ‘apps’ menu in the settings.
As an Android user, not developer, I wanted to ask how are permissions on Android these days.
Is "internet access" permission just granted for any app by default without asking the user?
There were initiatives (probably 3rd party) for more granular permissions, but I haven't noticed this becoming common. I vaguely remember that Android started asking for some individual permissions not upon installation, but only when they were first used by the app, e.g. camera access. Why is this not the case for internet access?
In a nutshell, how did permission granting in stock Android develop from say Android 3.x times?
I understand that some keyboards want to provide suggestions using a dictionary they download online. Also, I used to use SwiftKey once which wanted to read all my mail to produce better suggestions. Is there even a good way to balance the benefits (features) and risks (uploading a key log if the app is sold/abandoned and taken over by an attacker)?
> Is "internet access" permission just granted for any app by default without asking the user?
IIRC it was changed because people complained that a lot of apps required that permission despite the functionality not needing it. E.g. calculator app or whatever. Turns out that you need this permission if you want to display ads. So Google just sided with the advertisers and removed the permission from the display. Generally, I believe that Google likes internet connected things because they as a company have better tools to capture online revenue streams vs offline ones.
Even if I hate ads and I think one should be able to ban them forever on their devices, Android could just add an "Internet access" permission that only counts for Internet access required outside the Ads API, so they would keep their ads and users could be a bit safer on the "this app is snooping my data" side.
That would only work if they open up the Ads API to work with any ad network. Otherwise it would basically kill any competition in the Android Ad space, which would probably lead to EU and US regulators coming down hard on Google.
They could instead expand the permission system to group various ad api's so that each api is considered a distinct permission. Honestly would be good to do that in addition (i.e. separate from) the general internet permission.
I agree that it would be nice to separate the privileges if it were possible.
I suspect that allowing internet access even in the form of ads opens the possibility for data exfiltration in principle. But I'm not familiar with the Android case at all.
It allows for expensive, obvious data exfiltration. (Expensive in the sense that somebody else could take the data, unless you're the highest bidder for those categories – assuming Google Ads still shows ads with a bid of 0, which I'm not confident in.)
A good solution to this is using iptables to control what has access to which networks, rather than relying on the OS. AFWall+ is a nice front end for iptables and requires root. Netguard is another option that doesn't require root, but I'm not sure how that one works.
Certain permissions (internet is one example) are granted when the app is installed, other permissions (e.g. access to photos) require the user to give access through a dialog prompt (and from Android 10(?) the user will be asked again every so often, rather than just once).
All permissions an app can use are listed in the manifest file, and are displayed on Google Play.
I know I "shouldn't" but I use Google Keyboard. It is really compelling and has legitimate use cases for a network connection with the built in GIF search.
In theory, they keep your data private, combine it with the greater learnings of the world, and provide you with perfect autocomplete and autocorrect.
In practice though, it just doesn't work. I got GBoard for a while because it has a bilingual keyboard, but the autocomplete suggestions often ended up being people's first names instead of common words (and not even the people I was talking to).
I speak French much better with GBoard, because it spells better than I do. It also has a pretty good sense of grammar: it will often autocomplete the correct ending of a verb. (It feels like cheating to use it with Duolingo.)
Of course I speak only simple French, and those are the cases where its primitive learning is most apt. When I speak English, its suggestions are less useful, because I use a much wider vocabulary and more sophisticated sentence structure.
Holy crow, the feature where you can move the cursor by swiping back and forth on the spacebar is AMAZING. Seriously, I have always struggled with moving the cursor in text on either android or ios. This is great!
It does not work on the default iOS keyboard. You can't just slide your finger around the spacebar, you have to long press on the keyboard and hope you don't trigger the alternate character popup instead. Then while you're moving the cursor around, half the time it will just start selecting text. Moving the cursor sucks on iOS.
Thank you! I've frequently read articles and forum posts describing the feature like the parent does, and I've never succeeded in getting it to work. I just assumed it wasn't supported on my old phone. Now I know.
I'm an android guy, but force touch moving cursor on iOS works very fine. Better than spacebar sliding. Just press harder on on keyboard and it'll hide keys and let you desk the cursor around, mouse style.
That's me pasting your comment into a reply box and then using my iPhone 8 to move the cursor around. Once I start moving the cursor all I'm doing is moving it, nothing else. You can see that it starts selecting text randomly twice. It actually took me longer to trigger it this time than usual.
I think it happens when I moved to the top of the text and then make a downward motion. It's really, really annoying on a regular basis.
Hm, tried it, but it doesn't seem to work that way on the AOSP keyboard (LineageOS/Android9 here). Either hits '.' or the language change button, or I get the "select keyboard layout" pop up due to a long press on space.
Will check out OpenBoard, because this sounds like a great feature.
Thanks for the pointer, though I already know about it. But then I can't change the volume when in a text input field - with headphones and very dynamic music I found this to be an issue.
Oops I accidentally submitted that, when trying out the keyboard features (i copied some random text and started soft kbd space sweeping to move the cursor. Didn't notice i apparently submitted the text too)
No gesture typing, unfortunately. I miss that feature from GBoard, whenever I try an open source one.
Yes, ASK has it, but it is not at all smart about figuring out what word I mean if I happen to not start my gesture on the exactly right starting letter.
No gesture typing in 2011, ahem, 2021 is not even worth considering to me.
I'm using a closed source keyboard because it just works better than all the open stuff (at least when I last tried various keyboard in ~2018), but have it firewalled off completely in AfWall+. That means no updates, though it learns new words like COVID-19 well enough from me, but also no data leaking (I'd happily contribute typing stats if it were some non-profit handling my data).
Swiftkey is what I found to work the best. It puts symbols on keys (e.g. long press m to make /), can make symbols like × by long-pressing *, can have a number row above the keyboard, and the predictions are some of the best as far as I've been able to tell.
I also don't mistrust Microsoft that much, since they don't have a data-oriented profit model, so even if the firewall is slow to boot up and lets it upload a backlog, even then it should be okayish.
I made the mistake of updating it once, though, and got an uglier design and now need to press two buttons to get into incognito mode rather than just one. Lesson learned: never change a nice system if it's fully firewalled and isolated... or at least have a planned retreat.
You can use the swipe functionality of the gboard even with the open source android keyboard provided you are rooted. It's just a library file that you have to install.
Fun fact, one of my banking app prevents me from launching it if I do not use a "certified" keyboard app. I had bad luck with any keyboard from F-Droid.
Banking apps are such a disgrace. Full of weird ideas about what is ok and what is not and which data and whatnot they need or else they won't run and in the end it doesn't help at all.
My bank recognizes the risk that third-party keyboard apps pose, and has their own keypad in their authentication app.
The same bank has a maximum password length of 8 characters, and they'll truncate longer passwords without informing the user -- set the password to "correct horse battery staple" and you'll be able to log in with "correct ". When I pointed it out they recommended setting a shorter password.
And for good reason. It's the operating system that should offer a 'certified secure' keyboard if the app requests it though. A bit like Windows' account password entry screen that is sandboxed from the rest of the OS (if I understood it correctly).
In this case, the app has its own keypad when logging in so I'm not sure what the added value is security-wise.
I'm just not able to launch the app while an F-Droid keyboard is set as default which is just annoying. There's many keyboards on the Play Store that I wouldn't trust to install and use.
Well, one of the banking app that I use is really well done (the other one is garbage), it makes my life really easier and has QR code payments included which is how I pay everything online in my country (Belgium) instead of having to use the card reader and it's also how I reimburse my friends if I owe them money.
And it has NFC payments that does not use Google Pay which is also nice.
For me hackers keyboard is still far best keyboard found, the only thing that annoys me is that it has no smileys button, for everything else it fits great.
I use ssh a lot and all the suggestions and other bells and whistles of other keyboards are more annoyance than anything else, but i need access to all the keys that normal keyboard has.
And '/', tab and enter must be accessible all the time this is absolutely primary requirement for me to use any keyboard.
You dont need to, I got myself cosmo communicator[1] and running linux (but still waiting for them to support camera to stop using the android phone completely). I am sick of androoogle ecosystem and touch keyboards :)
It takes very little to be better than Hacker's Keyboard. For me suggestions are broken altogether, but if you randomly get them to work and type "Ecample" it will not suggest anything because there are no words with that prefix. It also doesn't look at the previous word to bias which are likely next words (either in general or combined with the characters already typed). It's the dumbest keyboard ever, which is very nice on virtual terminals (hence it being a hacker's keyboard and my having it installed), but it's not useful as a general purpose keyboard.
I would love it if we could get something like SwiftKey, but actively developed. Its predictions are magic, but lately it has been getting more and more buggy, suggesting words that don't exist, changing already-correct words to nonsense, and refusing to learn.
Try deleting cache and data (backup your personal dictionary first). As with everything smart that learns (obviously YMMV, but that is my experience) it gets worse over time. Back when I used SwiftKey I deleted everything once a month to have a decent experience.
In my experience, the predictions were atrocious and not very smart, at least in French. It also couldn't detect words that had personal pronouns or determiners with an apostrophe, I had to type the apostrophe manually which is a no-go for me.
And it does not support having multiple languages at once which is incredibly inconvenient when you frequently have to switch between 4 languages when typing and when you often mix some of them.
But if you type without the autocorrect and the predictions, it can be great, I guess.
Does that mean that the "default" keyboard on Android does not respect my privacy?
As in, what does it do? Should I be worried about entering username, passwords etc from my Android device?
The "default" keyboard differs from device to device. Most devices have a closed source keyboard either from Google (gboard) or from Microsoft (swiftkey). If I remember correctly, both send subsets of what you type to the mothership and pinky swear to only use it for product improvement and guard your data with their lives.
Really, really wish there was Japanese support. That's one of the main reasons I have to keep using Gboard.
Also, my typing ability on mobile has been spoiled by Google's admittedly superior autocorrect. I find that many of the frequent mistakes I make are not detected or modified incorrectly on other keyboards, and have to re-learn a lot. It almost feels like vendor lock-in from bad typing habits.
I've used a bunch of open source Japanese keyboards: Mozc[0] (might be related to Gboard? haven't used gboard but the app is based off the same source code that powers Google IME), nicoWnnG[1]. I'm not sure how well they fare compared to proprietary keyboards but they've been good enough for my occasional use of Japanese.
Still using the inverted-triangle row arrangement, though.
If we're stuck with on-screen keyboards, please at least maximise use of horizontal space to make each 'key' as wide as possible. There's no need to copy the century-old typewriter convention.
I have a compact Cherry server-rack physical keyboard with the keys arranged in a grid and it's perfectly usable.
Sadly these come and go so frequently that unless you're into constantly tinkering, it can be exhausting to keep up with which keyboard is or is not in active development and receiving updates. OpenBoard seems to be suffering the same https://github.com/dslul/openboard/issues/250
Thanks, this looks interesting. And the settings. So many settings and I love settings :D
No permissions at all is pretty impressive. The only thing I can’t figure out: How will they make money? They seem to have run a IndieGoGo campaign and now ask for donations (hidden in the settings), but that will eventually run out.
This is especially worrying with something as specialized as this.
It's proving to be right up my alley. I switched to programmer's dvorak on the PC for exactly this reason; in the harebrained pursuit of ever increasing ergonomic efficiency!
I love FOSS and even trying to contribute a bit here and there. I instantly decided to give this keyboard a try and man, I didn't realize how I used to swype! Not having a swype is a show-stopper for me.
Am I understand it right that swyping is a patented tech[0] and we will not see it in FOSS for at least 6 more years?
I'm using it with a colemak layout. The only thing I'm missing is multi language predictions. Now I have to switch(long press space) layouts each time I need another language.
I regularly use the swipe spacebar and swipe backspace.
I've moved from IOS to Android 6 months ago and have been frustrated by a high % of intended alpha char keystrokes ending up as stickers culminating recently in me sending "I miss you" sticker to my boss.
Multiling O Keyboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh) has swipe. Accuracy is not great and it takes awhile to train but it doesn't have internet permissions at all. It's also highly configurable.
It didn't have the net permission until sometime in 2019, when it started to have it—without any indication as to why, and even the text ‘no internet permission = safer’ remained on the store page.
It seems the permission is again dropped now—but see user reviews for indication that it was indeed once used. For such a personal and important piece of software I for one will prefer an app that doesn't flip-flop on this decision—who's to say that it won't flip again tomorrow? The app is great; it being closed, not so much.
In case one is using LineageOS, what keyboard is used then? Is it the vanilla AOSP keyboard? How does the LineageOS keyboard compare to privacy conscious keyboards like this one or the AnysoftKeyboard?
I can only use the SwiftKey keyboard for physical reasons. I have a big 6.7" device, and this keyboard allows me to type with the keyboard closer to the middle of the screen. If I type on the bottom, it's harder to hold the device and it becomes unbalanced.
If they haven't already done so since last time I checked, I encourage the FOSS keyboards to consider adding a "raise the position" of the keyboard feature.
I've never had the notion or urge to try a different keyboard than what came with the various Android phones I've had over the years. It looks like there are some possible privacy benefits to it, but why else should I switch? What advantage do other keyboards give or what is wrong with the default ones?
I don't know about open source privacy centric keyboards, but I bought Minuum many years ago and its awesome. It gives me way more screen real estate (particularly useful if I'm commenting and referencing previous messages). I'm really concerned about it stopping working one day.
I love OpenBoard but their development has been very slow in the time that I've been using it. It's really solid for the most part but there's just a couple of features (like swipe-typing, and emoji search) that I wish it had. Still though, better than GBoard spying on me.
I use an old version of the Swype keyboard, that came pre-installed on my Galaxy S6. Unfortunately, I've become so used to swipe and gesture support (particularly "Ctrl"-{a,x,c,v}) that I'm waiting on a FLO keyboard that can do those things to switch.
I haven't seen Multiling O Keyboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh) mentioned yet. It's not nearly as accurate as Gboard out of the box but once you get used to it and train it well it's not bad. It is insanely configurable.
As a very long term iOS user, when I saw this headline my first reaction was why is keyboard privacy even a thing i've never even bothered changing the keyboard of iOS and would certainly be prompted for any suspicious activity like mic or camera and would instantly reject it if i ever installed one. But this is very complicated on Android. I once maintained an Android phone for my Dad and the permissions prompt on that are so overwhelming that it's very easy to get people into 'accepting all' and I feel like this is the idea behind the design by Google. One shouldn't be worried about a keyboard spying about you and should be as easy as flip of a switch in settings from not allowing it but it's a lot more complicated than that on Android.
Well, iOS uses the same differential ML approach for their keyboard suggestion learning just like Google's GBoard does. So you kinda have the same concern there.
It also has multiple keyboard layouts, of which "terminal" compares favorably to hacker's keyboard. I like that it is configurable, and has a lot of text editing tools when swiping space up.
I admit I lost some typing speed when I switched from the alternatives, but I'm happier with it.
[1] https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/