HeliBoard keyboard is an improved fork of the now-unmaintained OpenBoard keyboard. It does not require internet permission, allowing it to be used 100% offline.
Add dictionaries for suggestions and spell check
Customize keyboard themes (style, colors, and background image)
Customize keyboard layouts (only available when disabling system languages)
Multilingual typing
Glide typing (only with closed-source library ☹️)
Clipboard history
One-handed mode
Split keyboard (only available if the screen is large enough)
Number pad
Backup and restore your learned word/history data
Features that may go unnoticed, and further potentially useful information
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
You had me at “number pad”
Now after a day of intense testing, I got to say the keyboard is great. It has everything I needed to switch away from gboard. Even background image function and translucent keys and dual language. I really hope this project is maintained forever, that’s how good it feels to use this keyboard.
Thanks, this is basically all I needed to hear. Im gonna try it out immediately.
Some options are a bit hidden and you got to tinker a bit to understand what keyboard layout you want, but it’s all there.
Works great so far!
Tried it out but my language sadly has the wrong layout so for now I’ll stick to Gboard with disabled internet access.
Why does it need to read and write to my contacts?
In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe
Have you asked it to show contacts as suggestion? If not then deny.
Definitely check out the Hidden functionality part of the readme (it’s also in this post’s body)
How do I enable the multi lingual typing? In the keyboard settings I added German and English. Now I can switch with the spacebar, but I require it to work automatically. It should detect if I’m writing in english or German and then automatically change word suggestions and change auto correct.solvedAlso not switch qwertz with qwerty layout, as obviosly I know only qwertz keyboard. Also üäöß need to be hidden and replace uaos automatically by dictionary. AS it does in Gboard. I’ll report back if I find the option.solvedEdit: Okay looking good with the auto correct and suggestions now, I had to click on my keyboard language qwertz
Germanand add English to the multilingual and not both separately. Testen wir dies nun mit Deutsch. Works.Ignore the double post. It appeared out of nowhere. Strange.
I wonder where the second post came from. It was just suddenly there, without me copy pasting anything.
I can’t find this on f-droid for some reason…
I had the same problem using droid-ify until I uninstalled openboard for some reason. (Technically I uninstalled the fork that has since turned into helibord, but it was called open board also before they renamed it for f-droid release, so it still showed up as open board in droid-ify, just a newer version)
It did show up in the normal f-droid app for me though
Confusing… I’m currently using openboard; does that mean I’m actually using heliboard?
Someone forked the project (made a copy and started making updates and improvements to the copy independent of the original developer) and I installed it directly from the forked github repo, where it was getting updates. But they didn’t rename it until they published it on f-droid, so the app still showed up as openboard on my phone, just a newer version than the one available on f-droid
It’s a fork.
With a little customization I able to generally get a setup I liked except for a persistent terminal-friendly top row from AnySoftKeyboard (Ctrl, Tab, |, /, Arrows left, up, down, right, Esc). I don’t do too much terminal work, but when you do, it’s so handy—but eventually I noticed how handy it was outside the terminal as feature like Ctrl+V or arrows being faster than using menus or long pressing the screen. Tab is really great for typing accessible code snippets too.
It’s a bit sad the dictionaries are held on a pirvacy-respecting, German nonprofit-held, free software Codeberg repository, but the main repository is tied to the US-based, megacorporate, proprietary repository. Not even a mirror.
The biggest selling point is how unlike AnySoftKeyboard, you don’t need to get an Android+Java environment setup just to add or tweak a new keyboard. Being a JSON file & having many to-JSON options, users are hardly shackled to a specific or difficult-to-work-with option. Even if not perfect, ultimately I might give this a fulltime go when I have time to write out the three language keyboards I need—which is not a phrase I could say about other options since the time to set up for & learn the basics for Android was a task too large.
This needs more contributors FYI. There’s a ton of issues and feature requests
dude I’ve been using it for a couple of days. I absolutely love this. I even found the setting to use an image as a background and it works great! this is my all time use keyboard now. was very happy to get rid of Swiftkey.
Writing with it right now. I think i just disabled gboard for good.
Finally!
I saw this recommended elsewhere on Lemmyna few days ago and have given it a shot after a month or two trying AnySoftKeyboard - its great.
It may not be as obviously feature laden with additional keyboards etc as ASK but it has much better defaults - all of the extra punctuation is where my fingers just expect it to be after a long time on SwiftKey.
Thanks, this looks great! Just downloaded it and gave it a quick spin.
There are lots of privacy-friendly keyboards but many only implement English and some very basic features. However, this one does it all.
I want to love it, but the swipe feature using the external library is OK (worse than Gboard) for English, but horrible for Spanish. I have to correct every other word.
I don’t know if it’s a library or heliboard issue, but it’s a dealbreaker.
Florisboard 0.5 is supposed to release with native functionality, hopefully works better and heliboard can use that too