OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your privacy

Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by MayeulC on Thursday January 07, 2021 @06:41AM (#25669918)

I use AnysoftKeyboard (on F-Droid) [1]. I's pretty good, but has issues with the French apostrophe, that's often used to combine words.

It also has multiple keyboard layouts, of which "terminal" compares favorably to hacker's keyboard. I like that it is configurable, and has a lot of text editing tools when swiping space up.

I admit I lost some typing speed when I switched from the alternatives, but I'm happier with it.

[1] https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by chrismorgan on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:38AM (#25670835)

I just now figured I’d try AnySoftKeyboard. Its stock behaviour seems a little weird in places, but I’ll try it for a while and see how it goes. But the real thing that’s annoying me is how uncompromisingly huge it is. Its default behaviour has it consuming a shade under two thirds of the available screen space on my not-inordinately-large phone, compared with under half on the Samsung keyboard in its compact (reduced-height) mode. You can control the height of the top row (and it’s compact by default), but can’t control the height of the rest (other than by going to a theme that consumes even more space)? I want to eliminate the wasted ~30px at the bottom, and shrink each row by around 20px. I can easily save 100px here without removing anything.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by aasasd on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:44AM (#25671581)

ASK's preferences organization could use some work. What you want is in the ‘select theme’ screen: press the gear, then see ‘keys height factor’.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by chrismorgan on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:55AM (#25671721)

Ah hah! Thank you. 0.65 is much better. Yeah, that gear thing is terribly placed.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by MayeulC on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:50AM (#25671653)

I agree it's a bit big, I tend to configure my keyboards to use the minimal size. That said, there are multiple themes to pick from, and some are smaller than others. You could conceivably make your own, though I have never tried.

Edit: thanks a lot aasasd, I had just spent a few minutes looking for it (again), without finding it.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by circularfoyers on Thursday January 07, 2021 @07:13AM (#25670140)

I don't see any reason why someone would use OpenBoard over AnySoftKeyboard. It would of been nice if there was an explanation of what differentiated it. If someone just wanted a different looking keyboard they could just have created a new theme for AnySoftKeyboard.

AnySoftKeyboard also is the only open source keyboard for Android that has gesture typing. Which is something I grew to love from when I used Gboard.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by jmnicolas on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:33AM (#25670793)

The search function on FDroid is atrocious. I find all the language packs for Anysoftkeyboard but not the keyboard itself.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by yorwba on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:43AM (#25670881)

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboa...

I think the search function is working fine, the app is just called "AnySoftKeyboard 3D Theme" in the F-Droid app but not on the website for some reason.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by solarkraft on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:07PM (#25674788)

With all default repos + IzzyOnDroid enabled and searching exactly for that package name I get all the language packs and a 7 years old PC theme, but not the app itself. I'll just download the APK, I guess.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by circularfoyers on Thursday January 07, 2021 @02:09PM (#25675714)

For future reference you can use the "Open in app" option in Firefox to open the app in F-Droid from the website link in the parent.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by Maha-pudma on Thursday January 07, 2021 @07:13PM (#25679546)

When I do that it does open in fdriid but to the "Armenian for AnysoftKeyboard".

Edit: thought I would install it and it turns out its English. Using to type this.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by opan on Thursday January 07, 2021 @11:01PM (#25681374)

Yeah, the app name got screwed up for whatever reason.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by yorwba on Friday January 08, 2021 @07:10AM (#25683817)

This appears to be a known issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2014

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by jmnicolas on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:35AM (#25671455)

Then why I can't find it even with your keywords?

The other possibility is that it's not present for me because it might not be compatible with GrapheneOS?

But I have problems with search even for other apps. I'm OK with it it because FDroid is very good otherwise.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by vinay427 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:27AM (#25672097)

It shows up for me on GrapheneOS. I don't think the F-Droid search is OS-dependent anyways besides maybe the major Android version number. As the GP noted, for some reason the name is listed with the "3D Theme" addendum in the app which is a little bizarre. Does your browser support opening the link in an app, i.e. F-Droid?

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by ncmncm on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:16PM (#25680133)

When I installed that, my Apps settings page listed the Armenian layout "app".

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by scns on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:18AM (#25672001)

I concur, Foxy Droid works much better for me.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by pmontra on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:01AM (#25670492)

Swyping didn't work reliably when I tried one year ago, so I switched back to one of the keyboards of my phone (SwiftKey because I find it slightly better than Samsung's one.) Did they improve it in the last releases?

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by ad404b8a372f2b9 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:20PM (#25673949)

There is a pull request open which improves the algorithm massively. Author couldn't finish it because of health issues sadly. I've installed it on my phone and it works great but I had to update some parameters in the code so it'd work.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by circularfoyers on Thursday January 07, 2021 @02:05PM (#25675649)

I'm not sure if they improved it or it just works more reliably with the default theme. But about a year ago it was unusable but now I'm able to use it with only occasional errors.

Of course it's still not as good as Gboard, but I'd rather put up with the slight inconvenience for it being open source.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by JeremyNT on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:12AM (#25671932)

For me, it just doesn't do the job. I love ASK but this feature isn't competitive with the closed source alternatives.

Alas, I wish it were. This is all that's missing IMO.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by bestouff on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:24PM (#25674046)

Can't upvote this enough.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by aasasd on Thursday January 07, 2021 @10:03AM (#25671821)

Alas ASK could use an influx of developer efforts. Menny Even-Danan seems to be the sole developer (aside from some pull requests), and it looks like other stuff is keeping him busy lately—as in, in the past couple years at least.

I keep being perplexed when people reinvent software instead of joining forces (though I'm fine either way if the result is good). A better swipe-typing algorithm would be great, but even some smaller touches would make ASK much nicer: like, don't add a space after an opening parenthesis when swiping. Not rocket science, but needs someone to dig in the app's workings.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by pqb on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:01AM (#25670490)

I second the AnySoftKeyboard. It is nice alternative, however I miss the mode that resembles BlackBerry 10 keyboard, especially in case of autocompletion suggestions that popped over specific letter and I had to swipe it up [0] in order to complete the word. It was many times more pleasant to use than the "selection bar".

[0]: https://helpblog.blackberry.com/en/2013/02/blackberry-10-key...

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by dastx on Thursday January 07, 2021 @08:40AM (#25670846)

AnySoftKeyboard on the surface seems cool, however, they've overloaded it with unnecessary characters. When I tried it, I had English selected and yet somehow it has characters that are _never_ used in English. That's not necessarily an issue, but when non-English characters are easier to type than English characters, it decreases my typing speed significantly. I raised an issue about it and was quickly dismissed. I've stuck to SwiftKey since. I'll have to try OpenBoard!

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by Symbiote on Friday January 08, 2021 @06:56AM (#25683736)

Many people typing in English find it useful to be able to type names, places etc which require foreign characters.

"Let's meet at Nørreport, Lærke says she will be late."

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by dastx on Friday January 15, 2021 @06:36AM (#25789669)

Sure, but how often does the average English write/speaker do this?

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by ce4 on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:45PM (#25675334)

ASK has one Keyboard layout that includes cursor keys, tab/ctrl/pipe and forward slash. Very handy for termux and to move the cursor around which i also use all the time.

There's also the copy paste popup that can be activated by swiping up on the space bar which offers a nice cursor based highlight/copy/paste mode.

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by Peter-Jan on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:23AM (#25671307)

I love AnysoftKeyboard but it completely freezes once every few days when pressing the emoji key. Forcing me to reboot my phone. Which is quite annoying to say the least.

https://github.com/AnySoftKeyboard/AnySoftKeyboard/issues/18...

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Re:OpenBoard – FOSS Keyboard for Android which respects your... by aasasd on Thursday January 07, 2021 @09:48AM (#25671628)

Just as a workaround: you can stop the app without rebooting the phone. The full app list is probably not accessible, but you can go via the ‘apps’ menu in the settings.

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