I use AnySoftKeyboard, which I understand is supposed to be completely free and open source and doesn't harvest your data and is massively customizable.
It's just not very good at being a keyboard, I make hit-the-wrong-key typos all the frikkin time when I tap individual letters, but that's still more accurate than the drag-swipe thing.
The customization options could probably fix that and tune it all to work properly for my skinny fingers but android isn't fun to work with and I find the customization options confusing (probably because I don't know their vocabulary) and it's never quite gotten frustrating enough for me to be willing to spend one of my rare free weekends diving in and finding the documentation and studying it.
But on the other hand, it doesn't slow my phone down, doesn't start off good and then gradually anti-train itself to make more errors per minute each week that I use it, and it doesn't send everything I type to some AI-training datacentre belonging to google or microsoft, which seems a fair trade-off!
It has all the languages I need which is nice, as well as the privacy and performance. Doesn't have sliding type but last I looked no one FOSS has that, because turns out it's very difficult to do right. (Unless that changed in the last half year?) And yeah, the jank it has is consistent and stuff I can live with for the tradeoff.
Jcrabapple
in reply to 🦇 Domo • • •Allen Realname Versfeld
in reply to 🦇 Domo • • •I use AnySoftKeyboard, which I understand is supposed to be completely free and open source and doesn't harvest your data and is massively customizable.
It's just not very good at being a keyboard, I make hit-the-wrong-key typos all the frikkin time when I tap individual letters, but that's still more accurate than the drag-swipe thing.
The customization options could probably fix that and tune it all to work properly for my skinny fingers but android isn't fun to work with and I find the customization options confusing (probably because I don't know their vocabulary) and it's never quite gotten frustrating enough for me to be willing to spend one of my rare free weekends diving in and finding the documentation and studying it.
But on the other hand, it doesn't slow my phone down, doesn't start off good and then gradually anti-train itself to make more errors per minute each week that I use it, and it doesn't send everything I type to some AI-training datacentre belonging to google or microsoft, which seems a fair trade-off!
yelling jackal
in reply to Allen Realname Versfeld • • •oh hey I use it too!
It has all the languages I need which is nice, as well as the privacy and performance. Doesn't have sliding type but last I looked no one FOSS has that, because turns out it's very difficult to do right. (Unless that changed in the last half year?) And yeah, the jank it has is consistent and stuff I can live with for the tradeoff.
Allen Realname Versfeld
in reply to yelling jackal • • •@len You know, my biggest complaint is that it's really, REALLY easy to hit backspace or spacebar when I was aiming for l, k, m, n, b, or .
Maybe I should just have another go in the setup menus, probably theming, see if I can find a layout that's a little less cluttered in that region.
Like, it seems to autocorrect if I hit the wrong letter, which is great, but it doesn't extend to non-alphanumeric keys.