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FlorisBoard | FOSS keyboard that respects your privacy (florisboard.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I came across everyday topic on Techlore Discussions about free and open source keyboards for Android and discovered this little gem. It is FlorisBoard, a virtual keyboard for Android which respects privacy of the user. I can sigh with relief and finish my search for that singular keyboard for typing stuff on the go.

It has everything I need and more.

Multilanguage support: detailed layout options, popular presets
Swift and glide typing experience
Customizable gestures: switch language by fast swiping the keyboard itself left and right, change case by swiping up, the infamous cursor swipe on space bar
Emojis
Clipboard
Smartbar: quick actions and clipboard cursor tools
One-handed mode
Other look-and-feel settings

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Oh neat. Development had died down, but looks like it's picking back up again and the creator is finding more maintainers. It's what I use on my phone.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

Here, the developer explained why development activity decreased:

While it is true that due to private reasons I had to take a bit of a pause of developing FlorisBoard and some time passed with no progress at all, implementing a completely new statistical NLP (Natural Language Processing) provider, or in laymans terms the long-awaited word prediction and spell-checking implementation, is also a huge task which takes a lot of time and trial-error and development time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yeah I had given up on the project and had settled on OpenBoard for now, but if/when the word suggestions ever land, I'll gladly jump over. I don't dislike OpenBoard per se, it's actually pretty decent, reminds me of older AOSP when it was a bit more naive, but I really miss swipe typing.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (3 children)

https://github.com/Helium314/openboard/releases

Openboard fork with swipe typing

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Note that this fork relies on the proprietary Google library to do this. It's not really an alternative.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Iiiinteresting. Will test that out. Thanks!

Edit: works great! Thank you so much.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Didn't know they did releases. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You should give AnySoftKeyboard a spin. Has word suggestions that are really good and the swiping works really well too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I kind of dismissed it as the project looks more or less dead on GH...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

makes want to learn kotlin, so i could contribute