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.
I just tried HeliBoard again for a few days. The accuracy and autocorrection is pretty similar to Futo. But FUTO was better with space, by far. In HB, very often when I tried to hit space, it typed B instead. It probably partly a me problem because it does sometimes happen in Futo too, but much less frequently.
The bigger problem with Heliboard was that it mostly breaks my password manager, Proton Pass.
In Futo, when I tap my thumb on an email or password field, I get a popup in the Futo keyboard word suggestion area asking me if I want to use Proton. I do not get that popup in HB and couldn’t figure out if there was something that I needed to change in settings. So that made HB much less usable for me.
Switche back to Futo and everything worked fine with Proton Pass.