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.

  • sbird@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    OH I did not know you could swiped the backspace key on Heliboard. That is so useful! Thanks internet person!

    Yeah, Heliboard is awesome. I fell in love with it because it is so ridiculously customisable, like you can change the position of all the symbol keys, the padding, the icons, everything! I also liked that there was an option to have it fit with my Material You theme (but it’s disabled by default, which I think is good for people who don’t like it)

    I also like that you can set the option so that swiping up-down or left-right on the spacebar can be set to anything. For me, I just have it move the typing cursor around, but you can configure it to do other stuff too!

    • db2@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      OH I did not know you could swiped the backspace key on Heliboard. That is so useful! Thanks internet person!

      Wait until it happens accidentally and half your paragraph disappears.