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Looking for an Android keyboard app
Hello friends, and thank you in advance for any help on this topic.
I am looking for an android keyboard that does not have emoji, stickers or gifs, but also has long press options for special characters like dashes, slashes and colons etc.
Searching online for variants of "no emoji keyboard," only floods my results with the opposite and it's beyond frustrating!
I realize that the answer is likely right under my nose and I'm just missing it for whatever reason.
I would glady pay money for such an option if only I could find one.
I'm sorry if this question is silly or posted in the wrong thread, but I'm at my wits end.
Again, thank you for any help or redirection to my query!
Cheers!
I use unexpected keyboard on f-droid. It uses swiping in different directions for special characters, allowing each key to have a main symbol and up to 4 other symbols. It does have the ability to enter unicode emojis, but its a secondary mode acessed by swiping down and to the left on the fn key of the keyboard, so its pretty out of the way, and I think you can also turn it off in settings.
Thank you so much! Unfortunately, my 1 year old Galaxy A54 is apparently "too new," for this program :/
Futo Keyboard (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.futo.inputmethod.latin.playstore) perhaps?
It's customisable enough that I'm sure you'll find a layout you like.
I just deleted it because although you can disagree emoji button, emoji still pop up in almost every predictive text option.
I am just so sick of seeing yellow faces.
Are you sure you can't disable it in suggestions? It seems to be an option in the settings:
https://i.imgur.com/PYS6BUa.png
I don't get any emojis in suggestions, though I do leave the emoji icon on the keyboard because sometimes you just gotta throw up a little yellow face 😊
There is a toggle to disable emoji suggestions under Keyboard & Typing -> Typing preferences. It does exactly what you want it to.
I have tried nearly every keyboard under the sun and Futo is by far the best general use keyboard available.
Really? I've been using it for a while now and I've never seen emojis pop up in suggestions
If you don't need swipe based input, consider Hackers Keyboard.
Seconding this. Awesome keyboard. It even has such amazing features as having the number keys correspond to the special characters present on a real keyboard (what the actual fuck Google, how could you miss on this). I.e., long pressing "8" will offer an option for "*".
I also love having access to stuff like tab and directional cursor keys. Useful for ssh sessions and the like.
I absolutely do not need "swipe" anything!
I'll give it a shot, thank you!!
Trust me on this, the best open sourced keyboard around is absolutely Heliboard. Its essentially (and better than!) SwiftKey.
Incredibly smooth, customization is great, and development pace is unbelievable. I've been using it daily for the last few months and have never had a single issue with it.
There are emojis, but you can disable them, like I do. I never use them, they are never suggested, its great.
Long press for symbols, custom layouts for number keys, swipe on keyboard to move around words and characters, hold backspace and swipe to delete long stretches, gesture typing can be added fairly easily, custom dictionaries, clipboard history, undo/redo, and actually working autocorrect (something that's in a rough state on a lot of non-major keyboards).
I tried Futo, but it just doesn't hold a candle to Heliboard.
Not OP, but I'm trying out Heliboard now. Swiftkey is the best keyboard I've found personally, but the latest update messed up the text deletion/backspace. Basically, if I select a large swathe of text and delete it, it won't delete it all. Which has always been a problem with multiple paragraphs' worth of text (I usually switch to the default keyboard when deleting big chunks of text in docs), but now it's worse because it seems to leave at least the last 8 characters. Which I discovered because I have the habit of tapping the address bar and typing in text to being up another site. Even Tildes still leaves "ldes.net" in the address bar. VERY annoying, obviously.
I tested Heliboard by writing this comment and editing a Google doc I had open. I'd say the comparison to SwiftKey is fitting, at least in terms of the key placement since I'm not hitting the wrong key constantly. Back when I experimented with keyboards there was usually an adjustment period, but not this time. Already fiddled with some settings to make it more similar.
So far, the autocorrect isn't as punchy as I'm used to, but it's definitely better than most. Just doesn't always correct the words, even when it suggests the proper word. Looks like we can rearrange the keyboard, so I can probably fix the symbols that are stuck in muscle memory, but I'll save that for tomorrow when my brain isn't fried from being in a car for 8+ hours.
Is there a way to change the backspace button so that if you hold it down, it starts deleting whole words instead of just one character at a time? That's the one thing that keeps throwing me off so far, but if not, it's a minor thing I can adjust to.
Also, can confirm for the OP and others: it's possible to totally disable emoji menus in the settingd. Hooray!
If this is up to date, then it's not implemented yet, you're encouraged to use the "swipe to delete" gesture for now.
But I agree, I've tried other keyboards and miss the long press to delete words that SwiftKey has, it's a really good feature.
A shame, but oh well. Like I said, pretty minor.
A 23-hour update: after using it some more, I think I'm sticking with this one. There are some adjustments to be made, mainly in regards to the autocorrect, but it's not the worst. It's also, as you noted, highly customizable. I already changed some of the symbols layout to be closer to SwiftKey (at least the ones I use the most), and I'm now experimenting with custom colors for the theme. Also oh my gosh there's an undo and redo button. They're kinda buried but they exist. I'll need some time to get used to that, but that is one adjustment I will be happy to deal with! Thanks for recommending it!
I still miss the heck out of a physical keyboard thoughI'm also gonna give Heliboard a go after being a long time SwiftKey user.
So far it seems pretty good as mentioned in the other comment. One gotcha for me which I've got to test here is how good the support is for language switching to a Norwegian keyboard and how good the dictionary is. On Swiftkey it was really good and I think that will be the make or break for me.
I use https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io/ (fdroid)
It checks all your boxes (you can configure it without gifs/emojis/etc), but it is old school, without swype-type and a bit complex to configure.
I tried this in earnest, but unfortunately, my 1 year old Galaxy A54 is apparently "too new," for this program. I even downloaded it from 2 different sources.
With GoodLock or FineLock on Samsung devices you can install KeysCafe and then make your own custom Samsung keyboard. Video (ignore the silly flashing button press thing, you do not have to use it).
https://youtu.be/UjSrXBmjVXI?si=0d13ZedqXamXLfkg
You should be able to use the default Google keyboard if you have a Pixel device. Just open up the settings and you can disable emoji and sticker buttons, add symbol long press, and probably customize it exactly how you want.
Thank you, but I'm on android as the post says, and Google's "gboard" app has no such features, unfortunately.
These should all be default features for Gboard: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1663400/gboard-android-typing-shortcuts.html
To second the response, I suggested Google's keyboard because you're on Android. GBoard is highly customizable if you go through the settings. All the features you listed are available from the built in keyboard.
FUTO keyboard may be able to do what you need
Florisboard from f-droid is a good one, lots of customisation options.
I downloaded f-droid, and it was threatened same as all other options, essentially.
How can I customize it to exclude little yellow faces?
In the FlorisBoard app, press Keyboard then Utility Key Action, and change it to something else.
Its a nice keyboard but without text prediction/correction for now I think, although the roadmap on their GitHub does say development is getting moving again now after stopping for a bit.
As others have said, Gboard can be configured this way.
To turn off the emoji key: Settings > Preferences > Show emoji switch key
To turn off suggestions, basically disable everything under Settings > Emojis, Stickers & GIFS.
To enable symbols on long press: Settings > Preferences > Long press for symbols
I use Simple Keyboard and it perfectly matches what you are asking for.
It also supports some niceties that I consider essential, like swiping on the spacebar to move your cursor (highly recommended!), but they're all disabled by default. There is no option for emojis at all.
I would recommend giving openboard a shot. There is a setting in the preference menu to just straight up turn emojis off (and it doesn't have gifs at all). It also has all of the features that you would want in a keyboard (like for example the ability to move the cursor around by pressing and holding the spacebar). As a bonus the whole thing is open source so you can rest assured that it doesn't have all the spyware and AI crap that has recently started to plague a lot of other popular keyboards.
Does the default keyboard in Android not let you disable emoji? I guess this is one of the rare times where iOS has more configurability than android!
No, it does let you as far as I can tell.
I don't know why that isn't sufficient for the OP but I'm not turning mine off to find out!
There are definitely settings that let you turn off large swaths of the emoji functionality if you long-press the emoji button on the keyboard and click on the settings icon in GBoard, which is the default keyboard on my Pixel and afaik on stock android more generally. But the default keyboard may be different depending on what model android you're using -- I know my old Samsung had its own keyboard that I promptly replaced as default with GBoard. I don't know if these settings do everything OP wants, as I don't want to mess with my settings to test it out, but it certainly covers large portions of what they want.