For the last years I've been using Fleksy, which now appears to have been removed from Google Play for quite a while. For me, it's become the perfect typing interface and my brain wired itself to it, but recently it started crashing and restarting mid-typing at times, which is very distracting. I tried some alternative keyboards before, but they lack features or don't seem to be able to be configured to feel quite the right way. Does anybody have any suggestions?
These are the features I rely on daily:
- Support for LTR and RTL languages. Fleksy doesn't support Chinese, but if the new app supports that too, it's a serious upgrade for me because I'll be able to drop Gboard and just use one app with 5 languages.
- Swiping left and right on the spacebar scrolls through configured languages. This is common enough to be found in most keyboard apps though.
- Swiping left elsewhere deletes a word; holding after that makes it delete more with increasing speed.
- Gesture punctuation input. Pressing space twice after a word places a period, after that swiping up and down changes the punctuation to other symbols if needed.
- Typing correction integrated with gestures. After you press space once after a word, swiping up and down scrolls through suggestions or saves/deletes the word as is in the user dictionary.
- A customisable bar above the keyboard. I use the following widgets: select all, copy, paste, cut; a widget where swiping moves the cursor along the text (long-pressing the spacebar also does that, but I don't use it as often); several custom buttons with Unicode diacritics that I defined myself.
- The keyboard uses some neural network for word correction that learns to be more accurate with time. If you type the same new word many times, it also automatically adds it to the user dictionary instead of trying to correct it until the end of times. Though after years of use it seems it overlearned and some sort of collapse is happening, e.g. it always wants to change "wow" to "woe" now.
- Emoji. If the emoji font can be picked, it's an upgrade over Fleksy. If the emoji list doesn't lag for years behind Unicode, it's an upgrade over Fleksy.
- Very smooth and minimalistic UI. Haptic feedback that doesn't feel too weak or too strong. Keys don't feel like buttons with borders. This might seem like something minor, but it's extremely important to me because the keyboard app is one of the main Android interfaces for me.
A couple of screenshots to illustrate the last point:
Things I don't use / don't care about:
- Voice input.
- Glide input.
- Undo/redo.
- Word prediction before you finish typing.
- Rich content copy/paste, including GIFs/stickers.
- Clipboard history is a no. It's ok if it can be turned off.
- While I usually prefer FOSS, it doesn't have to be FOSS - the list of features is already a biteen ambitious for the FOSS projects I'm aware of. But I'd prefer it to have some reputation & not send my private data anywhere.
Some things I've tried and what didn't work for me:
- Gboard:
- doesn't seem to have functioning post-input correction, or I couldn't configure it so.
- theme customisation is basically nonexistent.
- text selection mode is a separate clunky view.
- lack of gestures.
- Heliboard:
- only does automatic blind post-input correction without showing what options were even considered.
- it's either corrected word options or buttons with extra functionality, not both at once.
- swipe-to-delete only works from backspace. I'm used to it working from any key except the spacebar.
- horizontal swiping on the spacebar either moves the cursor or changes the language, there's no way to have both. And there's no separate widget for moving the cursor.
- the visual spacebar height is small and can't be increased.
- there's no way to add custom Unicode symbols as toolbar buttons.
- FlorisBoard (less jarring to use overall):
- doesn't currently have functioning correction.
- doesn't have any swipe-to-move-cursor functionality anywhere.
- theme editing appears to be very powerful (CSS rules) and possibly powerful enough to replicate the impression I'm getting with Fleksy, but also too difficult; I haven't been able to configure some basic things yet, there were some obscure issues with some rules that silently decided not to work. Perhaps I just need to spend more time on this.
