I guess it ticks quite differently than gboard (which I don’t use). It is very customizable, even with add on modules.

I don’t use many of the options, though. I don’t like long press. No idea what you mean with GIF support.

The autocorrect usually asks whether I accept the correction or not.

It’s customizable, though you can’t, say, arbitrary drag keyboard keys around on an Android device. There are add-on layouts, and it’s possible to create those.

I don’t know what “GIF” support involves. It has some support for various Unicode emojis. If this is some sort of Android-native rich text field functionality to embed arbitrary image files, not that I’m aware of, but I may also just not use any apps that support it…I think all the apps I use may just edit regular text.

It does not support swiping, something that I don’t use but which some people do rely on.

The two most-significant things that it doesn’t do that I would like:

• It does not have the ability to attach arbitrary macro text strings to a key (well, absent from creating a new keyboard, I suppose), something that I have wanted.

• It doesn’t support the “drag on spacebar to move cursor in a text field” functionality that some Android software keyboards have.

Of the open-source keyboards, it’s the one that I find the best.

I believe – not in front of my device – that you can adjust the aggressiveness of text correction or disable it.

You can set it up to keep numbers visible.

I just don’t like correcting words into other words.

So, the normal way to deal with this – I don’t remember whether Gboard supports this, but I suspect it does, and Anysoft definitely does – is that autocorrecting keyboards don’t correct a word that they recognize as a word into another word. The thing is that they won’t recognize every word out there. So what you do is to create a “user dictionary”, and add your word to it. Then the keyboard knows that your brand name or technical term or whatever is a real word. With Anysoft, you see a list of corrections immediately above the keyboard, and you can tap on the word in its uncorrected form to add it to the user dictionary. You can go into the keyboard settings to view and delete or edit terms in the user dictionary. I don’t know about Gboard, whether this is an Android-wide convention or not, but with Anysoft, if you hit space after a word and get an unwanted correction, you can, before hitting any other keys, hit backspace and it’ll delete the space and revert the correction; you can then tap space again and continue with the uncorrected word, if you only want a single uncorrected word and don’t want to add it to your user dictionary.

I can understand that some people don’t want to deal with changing keyboards even if they don’t want to be tracked. But you are literally here asking about keyboards. If this is not the place to talk about this then what is? Anyone interested enough to wonder about what keyboard they use should consider their privacy as the main aspect for a keyboard, as it is an app that can see everything you write, including passwords.

but the reality is most foss apps are far inferior user experiences to corporate apps

This is absolutely wrong and too often repeated as a mantra, and not because they have actually good UX, but because the corporate apps have it worse even (but they set the standard so anything that isn’t like theirs is bad). From all keyboards I have tried (many, including corporate ones, closed source, etc) the closed source ones have usually the worse UX. They start better and then worsen over time. You said you like the personalisation options, but often there’s less options in any closed source corporate keyboard. It took them years for gboard to actually let users have the number row always on top. I could have that in other keyboards long before gboard. Swiftkey was wonderful, but over the years it got so bloated that it lagged when used. There’s unfortunately not a perfect keyboard, but through all the posts in this thread there were a lot of good recommendations that allow you to choose good customisability, respect of user privacy, and also fringe use cases not often supported. And in general, the worse options are the closed source ones.

The only real downside of Foss keyboards is that as they have more options they usually require a bit more set up time which puts many people off.

I’m currently using Heliboard, lots of customisability, Foss, good language support and a must for me, multi language support. So far I am making less typos than with many other keyboards. The downside is no swipe support right in the app, but you can get it to work too if interested using 3rd party libraries.

In the past I’ve been using gboard which was OK for a while but started making more and more typos and wrong corrections over time, that plus trying to degoogle myself pushed me away.

Also anysoft keyboard, pretty nice, and was quite happy with it but again started getting tired of some typos I kept making.

I am keeping an eye on futo keyboard too, which at the moment doesn’t support multi language support, maybe in the future when implemented I’ll try it.

It has a number of benefits over a normal keyboard:

1. No need for autocorrect since the buttons are so large that it’s hard to accidentally press the wrong one
2. It’s symmetrical so both thumbs can type any letter, so you can type faster, in fact the world record typing speed on a phone was set on a one-handed version of this, i’m sure with the two-handed you can go even faster
3. Pretty much everything I need can be hit without switching to another layout (no need for a symbols page)
4. The other features of the keyboard are easily accessible, like, copy/paste/select all/undo/redo etc.

It’s awesome, it’s foss, and not a keylogger like most keyboards.

I’m with you. That looks like someone hacking into the mainframe.

https://files.catbox.moe/emce3c.mp4

I’m not very good at it yet I’ve only been using it for a month or so

That sounds like a really nice feature (the copy between devices). Does it have gifs built in?

No that’s correct. It cannot distinguish between typos and different words