HeliBoard keyboard is an improved fork of the now-unmaintained OpenBoard keyboard. It does not require internet permission, allowing it to be used 100% offline.
Features
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Add dictionaries for suggestions and spell check
- Build your own, or access them here, or in the experimental section (quality may vary)
- Additional dictionaries for emojis or scientific symbols can be used to provide suggestions (similar to “emoji search”)
- Note that for Korean layouts, suggestions only work using this dictionary; the tools in the dictionary repository cannot create working dictionaries
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Customize keyboard themes (style, colors, and background image)
- Can follow the system’s day/night setting on Android 10+ (and on some versions of Android 9)
- Can follow dynamic colors for Android 12+
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Customize keyboard layouts (only available when disabling system languages)
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Multilingual typing
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Glide typing (only with closed-source library ☹️)
- Library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open-source library available
- Can be extracted from GApps packages (“swypelibs”), or downloaded here
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Clipboard history
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One-handed mode
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Split keyboard (only available if the screen is large enough)
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Number pad
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Backup and restore your learned word/history data
Hidden Functionality
Features that may go unnoticed, and further potentially useful information
- Long-pressing the Clipboard Key (the optional one in the suggestion strip) pastes system clipboard contents.
- Long-pressing keys in the suggestion strip toolbar pins them to the suggestion strip.
- Long-press the Comma-key to access Clipboard View, Emoji View, One-handed Mode, Settings, or Switch Language:
- Emoji View and Language Switch will disappear if you have the corresponding key enabled;
- For some layouts, it’s not the Comma-key, but the key at the same position (e.g. it’s q for Dvorak layout).
- When incognito mode is enabled, no words will be learned, and no emojis will be added to recents.
- Sliding key input: Swipe from shift or symbol key to another key. This will enter a single uppercase key or symbol and return to the previous keyboard.
- Hold shift or symbol key, press one or more keys, and then release shift or symbol key to return to the previous keyboard.
- Long-press a suggestion in the suggestion strip to show more suggestions, and a delete button to remove this suggestion.
- Swipe up from a suggestion to open more suggestions, and release on the suggestion to select it.
- Long-press an entry in the clipboard history to pin it (keep it in clipboard until you unpin).
- Swipe left in clipboard view to remove an entry (except when it’s pinned)
- Select text and press shift to switch between uppercase, lowercase, and capitalize words
- You can add dictionaries by opening the file
- This only works with content-uris and not with file-uris, meaning that it may not work with some file explorers.
- Debug mode / debug APK
- Long-press a suggestion in the suggestion strip twice to show the source dictionary.
- When using debug APK, you can find Debug Settings within the Advanced Preferences, though the usefulness is limited except for dumping dictionaries into the log.
- For a release APK, you need to tap the version in About several times, then you can find debug settings in Advanced Preferences.
- When enabling Show suggestion infos, suggestions will have some tiny numbers on top showing some internal score and source dictionary.
- In the event of an application crash, you will be prompted whether you want the crash logs when you open the Settings.
- When using multilingual typing, the space bar will show a confidence value used for determining the currently used language.
- For users doing manual backups with root access: Starting at Android 7, some files and the main shared preferences file are not in the default location because the app is using device-protected storage. This is necessary so the settings and layout files can be read before the device is unlocked, e.g., at boot. The files are usually located in /data/user_de/0/<package_id>/, though the location may depend on the device and Android version.
Planned features and improvements:
- Customizable functional key layout
- Will likely result in having the same functional key layout for alphabet and symbols layouts
- Support for alt, ctrl, meta and fn (#479)
- Less complicated addition of new keyboard languages (e.g. #519)
- Additional and customizable key swipe functionality
- Some functionality will not be possible when using glide typing
- Ability to enter all emojis independent of Android version (optional, #297)
- (limited) support for customizing all internally used colors
- Add and enable emoji dictionaries by default (if available for language)
- Clearer / more intuitive arrangement of settings
- Maybe hide some less used settings by default (similar to color customization)
- Customizable currency keys
- Customizable clipboard toolbar keys (#513, #403)
- Ability to export/import (share) custom colors
- Make use of the .com key in URL fields (currently only available for tablets)
- With language-dependent TLDs
- Internal cleanup (a lot of over-complicated and convoluted code)
- (optionally?) move toolbar key pinning to a setting, so long press actions on unpinned toolbar keys are available
- Bug fixes
What will not be added:
- Material 3 (not worth adding 1.5 MB to app size)
- Dictionaries for more languages (you can still download them)
- Anything that requires additional permissions
Now after a day of intense testing, I got to say the keyboard is great. It has everything I needed to switch away from gboard. Even background image function and translucent keys and dual language. I really hope this project is maintained forever, that’s how good it feels to use this keyboard.
Thanks, this is basically all I needed to hear. Im gonna try it out immediately.
Some options are a bit hidden and you got to tinker a bit to understand what keyboard layout you want, but it’s all there.
Works great so far!
You had me at “number pad”
Writing with it right now. I think i just disabled gboard for good.
I can’t find this on f-droid for some reason…
I had the same problem using droid-ify until I uninstalled openboard for some reason. (Technically I uninstalled the fork that has since turned into helibord, but it was called open board also before they renamed it for f-droid release, so it still showed up as open board in droid-ify, just a newer version)
It did show up in the normal f-droid app for me though
Confusing… I’m currently using openboard; does that mean I’m actually using heliboard?
Someone forked the project (made a copy and started making updates and improvements to the copy independent of the original developer) and I installed it directly from the forked github repo, where it was getting updates. But they didn’t rename it until they published it on f-droid, so the app still showed up as openboard on my phone, just a newer version than the one available on f-droid
It’s a fork.