The successor of Openboard, Heliboard finally comes out in 1.0 my favorite open source keyboard out there.
If you can’t tell me what it is or how it’s useful to me when I scan through the primary landing page, not worth my time.
HeliBoard is a privacy-conscious and customizable open-source keyboard, based on AOSP / OpenBoard. Does not use internet permission, and thus is 100% offline.
First Paragraph of the readme.md in that repository.
Why do they always tell you it’s the successor of whatever, but never what it is for?
Read the whole sentence?
It was late…
HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it’s been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I’m really really happy and grateful for these tools. 💜
Just in case I’m asked, here’s the basics steps to get it going:
- I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
- I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
- Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked “load gesture library” and selected the downloaded swipe library
- And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it’s free and offline, but not FOSS.
That’s it.
Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:
Using it since version 14.1, as far as I remember but since then, I was finally able to replace gboard. Heli is really awesome. I always believed that florisboard will be my gboard replacement but for non-english swipe users nothing really changed or improved for years and then heli came out of the blue. Of course, it’s still a compromise compared to gboard and it probably always will be but to me it reached a point where this is minimal.
Yesterday I found out about the experimental dictionaries and imported them. Let’s see if there will be visible improvement. Does anyone have more experience with those dictionaries?
I didn’t know about experimental dictionaries. Would this help with swipe recognition as it’s really poor compared to gboard?
I found out about it only yesterday so I can’t really answer you this but it really seems like english works really well. I can’t day of it worked like tie with the old dictionary. Maybe someone else can answer this as I would like to know this as well.
Do you have a link to them? I can’t see them on their GirHub (bit I could just be missing it).
Sure. They were linked in the app too btw. Not every language does have one so maybe that’s why you didn’t find them.
Found them in the app. I had ‘Use System Languages’ selected. Changed that now.
Will see if it works any better. Thank you.
Good to know 👍
