this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Privacy
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FUTO Keyboard is hands down the best option.
If you have philosophical objections to the FUTO license, then your options are Heliboard and Florisboars. Heliboard is currently better, but Florisboard has promise.
I like the FUTO keyboard, but it's just so annoying that it doesn't support multi-lingual typing and the swipe just isn't as good as Gboard.
Which one is closest to SwiftKey? I got too used to its placement of symbols/special characters, its arrow keys, its always present number row, and it's left-handed friendly numpad. Been using it for almost 15 years now so it's going to be hard to switch to a keyboard that doesn't have an identical layout. I need to do it, though. Its autocorrect went to shit after Microsoft purchased it and I've been wanting to switch for years.
Seconding Skarn's comment. Heliboard has a lot of options for what is and is not displayed, shortcuts, etc. If you can't get it the way you want it through the options, a feature in settings allows you to edit the scripting for the layout. I have all the punctuation to the left of the space bar so I don't put periods between each word. It took me no more than 10 mins to configure that, including wasting time backing up the original script (it has an option to return it to defaults), and I'm a "hobbyist" progammer at most.
This sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I can't code but I'm not afraid of scripting. Thank you.
I found switftkey rather buggy, and stopped using it as soon as GBoard added decent multilingual support, so I really can't remember the key placement. All are pretty heavily customizable, I'd be very surprised if you couldn't get them to a state where you're comfortable.
Giving this a try myself. Interesting that it's in the Play Store but not F-Droid.
AFAICT their license does not fulfill the OSI definition and is therefore ineligible for inclusion in the main F-Droid repo.
They have their own F-Droid repo:
https://app.futo.org/fdroid/repo/
The repo is also pre-included in clients such as Droid-ify, which I use anyway because I like it better than the official client.
Doesn't even detect I am glide typing about half the time. Unusable on my Google Pixel 4a.
Which one of the three I suggested?
FUTO is definitely a bit more resource hungry. Try Heliboard, you need to add a separate library to enable swiping, but it's definitely way lighter.
Futo. Will try Heliboard once I get Graphene installed, thanks
Thank you for this recommendation, it's exactly what I was looking for to get me off of GBoard.
FUTO: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
... I was planning on testing them all here but that's so good I'll think I'll stop there! I see from recent reviews they are working on improving swipe even more :D thank you so much!
Please pay the licensing fee for ongoing development if you plan to use for an extended period👍
I'll probably jump around a bit now, by if its where I settle, I for sure will. Thanks :)