this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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The successor of Openboard, Heliboard finally comes out in 1.0 my favorite open source keyboard out there.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (11 children)

HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it's been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I'm really really happy and grateful for these tools. ๐Ÿ’œ

[โ€“] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Just in case I'm asked, here's the basics steps to get it going:

  • I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
  • I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
  • Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked "load gesture library" and selected the downloaded swipe library
  • And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it's free and offline, but not FOSS.

That's it.

Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How do you get your microphone option in the top right corner like that. Mine only shows up under the toolbar menu, after hitting the arrow key (top left corner)

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (5 children)

You can tap and hold on the microphone button to pin it to the right.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Exactly this. You can pin several functions this way.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

This is a hot tip!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This is the definitive replacement for gboard, people. It works fantastically well already with everything that Gboard has and it will only get better from here on.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Does it have multiple layouts support (Latin, Cyrillic), swipe typing and clipboard history?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Idk about layouts but swipe is available if you look into it, you just need to download a file to load the it into the keyboard and yes on clipboard history

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[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I second this

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

It's really great to see a continuation of Openboard.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Still waiting for Japanese support. At the moment the only decent Japanese keyboard on Android are either GBoard or Microsoft one unfortunately.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Have you tried fcitx with the Anthy plugin? I use that for Japanese.

https://github.com/fcitx5-android/fcitx5-android

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This update somehow has broken haptic feedback on my keyboard ๐Ÿค”

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Why do they always tell you it's the successor of whatever, but never what it is for?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (4 children)

TLDR: Why do I stop using OpenBoard and use this instead :)?

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Openboard hasn't updated in a year and a half

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Some new features, bug fixes, and ongoing support.

~~It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh - don't switch until you have a bit of spare time.~~ Missed the back and restore button in settings.

Personally I'm on one of the fork's beta versions. I'm waiting for the f-droid release so I get updates.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It is a new application so you do have to set it up fresh

You can import your OpenBoard settings

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

It has swipe typing plus a lot of other new features/theme customisation that openboard didn't have.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Looks nice but I wish the clipboard history could be based on number of items and not just time.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Been using this for about 3 months or so. The one piece missing is good swipe word recognition - its really poor compared to Gboard even after this amount of time. I spend more time correcting words than I saved nor typing them. Used swipe with Gboard for many years previously so I know hope swipe works.

Any suggestions on how to improve it?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (8 children)

I have found this to be the case as well.

What it has forced me to do now is to actually try to be close to the letters. When I'm swiping with gboard, I was very sloppy and it would recognize what I wrote. At this point, I'm fine being more accurate for the tradeoff.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Any idea when it's going to be available in fdroid?

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (8 children)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Been looking for a decent keyboard app, gonna try this out for sure ๐Ÿ™‚

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Is this better in any way tohan florisboard? I've been using it (florisboard) for a year now and had no problems and have loved its features (especially the text navigation arrows and clipboard history).

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Does not use internet permission, and thus is 100% offline.

Does the AOSP keyboard access internet?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What happened to OpenBoard?

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

Development ceased.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Using it since version 14.1, as far as I remember but since then, I was finally able to replace gboard. Heli is really awesome. I always believed that florisboard will be my gboard replacement but for non-english swipe users nothing really changed or improved for years and then heli came out of the blue. Of course, it's still a compromise compared to gboard and it probably always will be but to me it reached a point where this is minimal.

Yesterday I found out about the experimental dictionaries and imported them. Let's see if there will be visible improvement. Does anyone have more experience with those dictionaries?

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