this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I yearn for the day a FOSS keyboard for Android will have functional multilingual autocorrect. Most of the typing I do on my phone is in Frenglish and every FOSS keyboard I've tried has made it impossible to have autocorrect turned on. They always default to autocorrecting in either only English or only French which is just very frustrating.
Compare that to SwiftKey, which not only has no issues with mixed languages, also learns my texting patterns, such as typing j'fais rather than je fais. I just don't give it any permissions, including network access. It's one of the only proprietary things on my phone but I couldn't use my phone without it.
Have you tried this active fork of OpenBoard? The dev added support for multilingual typing months ago. This has Material You theme as well as glide typing (needs to be turned on manually).
Really happy with this fork, using it for several months now. Also occasionally Unexpected Keyboard for termux / ssh / code ....
Wow thanks, exactly what I've been looking for!
Edit: was using swype which was last updated in 2018 and is broken with android 14. Been looking for a replacement for ages. This open board fork is the best replacement I've tried so far. The word prediction works differently but I'll get used to it.
~~I've just installed it and it appears that you still have to manually switch between languages, otherwise it won't correct your attempts to write in another language.~~
edit: looks like you need to press on your preferred dictionary and add multilingual typing for it to work. it's quite decent, especially when you set autocorrect to "very aggressive", otherwise it will have difficulties recognising when you're trying to type in the secondary language.
I was honestly hoping for a reply like this when I commented. I'll give it a try, thanks! 😊 I'd love to ditch SwiftKey.
Edit: So far, it's the by far best FOSS option I've tried. There's even a couple of things it does much better than SwiftKey IMO (although I do wish there were an option to make the keyboard a bit smaller, it feels massive!) I'll stick with it for 2-3 weeks to try and train its auto-correct to my liking.
Do open an issue on GitHub for whatever you feel needs work. This project is being actively worked upon, I've seen stuff get implemented within a day even!
After looking around the settings a bit more, I noticed the "keyboard height scale" and "bottom padding scale" options, I set both of these to 80% and it's perfect!
Thanks again the the great suggestion 😊
Very impressed with the number of issues that have been opened in just the last few months. It's clear there is a lot of interests in a FOSS keyboard. There are requests for gifs in there as well. Also the multiple pull requests from different contributors are promising.
Unfortunately I, like many other, probably do like 30℅ of my communication via gifs so it's realm hard to go without regardless of how much I want to use a FOSS app.
I hate how good SwiftKey's autocorrect is. I'm definitely on the hunt for a good alternative in this thread.
I've been using the OpenBoard fork since it got recommended in this thread and it's been good enough for me to disable SwiftKey (not delete yet though, I'm not ready to fully commit to deleting that accrued personal dictionary). I recommend checking it out!
Thank you!! I'm trying it out now and it's definitely very promising. I love the swipe on backspace to select and delete. I do wish it had long press on backspace to delete a single word. That plus lowering the long press time makes it so easy to make corrections.
AnySoftKeyboard lets you merge dictionaries when you long press the Enter button. I've been using it for multilingual autocorrect for a few years now.
I've tried AnySoftKeyboard and that was not my experience. It worked fine if I only wrote out sentences that were fully in one language or the other, but as soon as I tried to switch mid-sentence it became completely borked.
I've been using the OpenBoard fork that was recommended in this thread for the past few days, and it's been lovely.
yeah, I'm trying the fork out of curiosity, but it's missing some little features ASK has and some of the other features are in different places, so I'm not sure how long it's gonna last.