After first being spotted in development in July of 2023, the Gboard beta is beginning to roll out an “Undo” button…
Nice. I love Gboard. One of the few things Google nails.
A good reminder to stop using gboard. Others have pointed to alternatives. Heliboard is another FOSS option that’s had this for years.
I wish Heliboard was usable, but it has so many small but show-stopping bugs or omissions.
I know, I know. Should fix it myself and do a pull request. Hopefully one day got time for that, like fixing the over-scaled emoji picked (that breaks kaomoji due to the scaling) or the lack of a search box there. It’s easily the closest FOSS keyboard to the big two (Gboard and SwiftKey), so with a bit more work it could really compete with them I feel.
I tried heliboard. It apparently kicks ass on the back end but the front end sucks and that’s the part I use.
FUTO Keyboard is the one!
With FUTO it feels nearly perfect, only issue is that in daily use I write a weird mix of German and English even in the same sentence, and hence I need full mixed-language input which it doesn’t seem to support (yet).
Thanks for the recommendation, trying FUTO out and really liking it. Gboard posts end in good FOSS recs.
I tried to love Heliboard too, had similar issues.
Moved to FUTO Keyboard after a recommendation on here, really happy with it
Thanks for the recommendation! It looks really good so far. Well, except for the swipe typing. If they can perfect swipe typing, I’d be so impressed. Even Gboard does it terribly. I noticed they have a public website to help train swiping. That’s neat. https://swipe.futo.org/
After I tap a suggestion , if I hit a punctuation key , it leaves a space after the word . (like in that sentence .) Gboard removes the space automatically, and Heliboard doesn’t add it to begin with.
Turns out, you can turn off automatic spaces entirely, and that feels better.
There’s a github for issue tacking and a Discord for discussions. These are good signs. I really like what I see so far.
Quality assessment A man of taste, discernment and sophistication
Herebisbmybissuevwithbheliboard
That shakes me to my core. Lol
I was looking for an alternative to fossify, thanks for the recommendation
But no Gboard means no voice typing :( I use that thing every day.
Heliboard with Futo voice typing ( unlike gboard it works offline)
They are not as good as Google’s especially for languages other than English.
Why don’t we like gboard again?
Personal data collection
That “g” stands for Google. You don’t pay for Google products, so you are the product being sold. You touch your keyboard often. You press sensitive and embarrassing things into it.
Fun fact it’s always had undo if you switch to the Japanese keyboard
I have absolutely no idea why that’s the only way you’ve been able to do it until now
it’s 2025 and having a freaking CTRL key on soft keyboards is still a luxury and obscure thing.
Why? Give us the CTRL key, and that’s that.
Still waiting for them to give me the option to make the keyboard automatically switch to floating in landscape mode (like it did before for a short period of time!) rather than do this:
Not sure I understand why you would want that. But more options for gboard would always be good.
I have a Pixel 7 pro and on the off chance I have to type in landscape it’s super inconvenient to write anything on that long ass keyboard lmao
The floating keyboard lets me swipe type with one hand, since I can reach the whole thing with just my thumb!
Huh I never type in portrait if I can help it, my thumbs are way too big for it. Landscape any time I’m typing and even then I wish I could make the keyboard bigger without losing visibility to what I’m typing/replying to. I also don’t swipe type, have never really liked it.
finally
Wow, it took them this long to include a backspace button? Jeez…
(yes I only read the headline, no I’m not going to read the page, yes I think it’s funny, and no I don’t care that you don’t. thanks for coming to my ted talk.)
