I’m looking for a privacy-respecting open-source android keyboard, and so far I’ve found:
Does anyone have any experience with these (or other alternative keyboards)? Which one would you recommend?
Here’s my lazy and unpopular solution
Ill go ahead and snail mail my boss lol.
All good but Florisboard has an internal clipboard with past entries. If you use its buttons (change in the settings, top row) and not the android ones, the system never gets your clipboard
Any keyboard with no internet permission should be “privacy-respecting”, as it can’t (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I’m personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it’s definitely something to get used to.
Related: how good privacy wise is the default AOSP keyboard found in no-Google-services ROMs like Lineage and /e/? Does it still phone home?
I use Gboard but with internet access disabled for it. I haven’t found a comparable open source keyboard yet.
Anyone know if it’s actually open source or if it has blobs?
Gboard isn’t open source, which is why I disable internet access for it.
I use openboard but it gets me mad sometimes when I start deleting characters and it removes the space between the last word…sometimes it’s really annoying!
That’s a Jerboa bug with any keyboard AFAICT. Insane how this hasn’t been fixed yet.
That weirdly only happens on jerboa for me
Is it while using Jeroba for Lemmy? I had that problem with that app so I switched to Sync for that reason.
No way I didn’t see that! I thought it was while using the English keyboard since it doesn’t happen in message apps and the only place I use English keyboard is in Lemmy (jerboa) … I’ll switch to other app
That’s due to a bug with the AOSP keyboard that google has been ignoring for like 6 years.
Privacy respecting, but not open source:
Typewise
(Also a lot less typos and faster writing once you get used to it.)
I use OpenBoard. It’s good, but my only problem is the lack of images being copied to the clipboard unlike my default keyboard.
It’s a long shot, but does anyone know if CJK languages (not romanizations) are supported in any of these?
Try https://github.com/osfans/trime. It has multiple input schemas (i.e. pinyin, zhuyin, cangjie, etc.) to choose from, and they are great for typing Chinese. Admittedly it only supports the C in CJK, but it is absolutely worth a try if you don’t need Japanese or Korean.
The alpha version of FlorisBoard has preliminary support for shape based Chinese layouts so you can write 汉字／漢字 with say, Cangjie or Zhengma. It also has the JIS kana layout for Japanese. Although, it doesn’t support Kanji Substitution yet, but you could use the shape based Chinese layouts for that in the meanwhile. As for Korean, it’s supported but no Hanja support yet.
While there isn’t a release for it yet, you can take any release artifact from the GitHub Actions CI and it should have it.
I use FlorisBoard. It’s not perfect, but it has a fully featured clipboard and undo-redo functionality. Missing the swipe tho.
FlorisBoard has swipe
Only for english, which isn’t my main language.
Try Thumb-Key. It’s a keyboard made by Lemmy’s main developer. It uses a rather exotic layout, but once you get used to it, it is so much better than qwerty.
Oh wow, that is different.
my favorite is unexpected keyboard. it takes a while to get used to but once you do it’s way faster than any othet keyboard.
I second that
Just adding Simple Keyboard here as well. It has no features besides typing. It’s literally just a keyboard. Been using it for a bit and like it, but it won’t be for everyone.
Any of them have good support for foldables? (I.e. Full keyboard on cover screen, thumb keyboard on main screen)
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Thanks! Giving it a try, so far it’s my favorite.
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