Over the years I’ve tested out pretty much all the Android keyboards, but swipe typing always kept me on GBoard, even though GBoard did not support voice typing for anything except Google, so I had to switch keyboards for that.
Recently I learned that HeliBoard has support for gesture typing with the Google library. But I couldn’t find any instructions on where to get the necessary files or how to do it. Well, someone posted a link to the file elsewhere so I’ll share it here. And it works! Extremely well. I can also pin a button for voice typing and then select Transcribro for that (which uses OpenAI Whisper locally and works super well.
Another gripe I had with GBoard was the cursor moves way too fast when swiping on the space bar. Not so with Heliboard. You can also swipe backwards from the backspace key and it will highlight text and then delete it when you let go.
Either it’s the nostalgia goggles, or another example of enshittification… but I remember when gesture typing was exclusive (actually was it exclusive? I’m doubting myself now) to FlexT9 and it was like magic - your gestures could be sloppy as fuck and it was still shockingly accurate. Someone must have bought them out or something, cuz FlexT9 kinda just disappeared and gesture typing started to become a standard feature. But no longer a reliable feature… as evident by the number of times I had to manually correct the autocorrects in this post…