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A FOSS swipe keyboard that wants user input
(makertube.net)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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Heliboard is awesome, and once you get it installed its swipe works well. I'm off Android now, but I'd turn on telemetry for Heliboard.
Swipe in my experience does need work. I'm glad they're doing this.
GBoard, before I switched, was like 95% accurate. I could trust it for blind typing. Heliboard with the google library is maybe 70% accurate and frustrating. "typing" in that last sentence was first "topping" the second "ripping" before I tapped it out.
To this day nobody is as good as Swype was. RIP.
Same experience here. Swype was the original and somehow after all these years still the best?! Or maybe I'm misremembering because my standards were lower back then.
GBoard is noticeably better then Heliboard. I still use Heliboard but it is frustrating sometimes, to the point where I wonder if I should just start typing with my thumbs instead. Might be faster on the whole, since I sometimes lose 5-10 seconds correcting the swipos.
I will start submitting gesture data ASAP. The keyboard world needs this.
Swype was great but Swiftkey's (pre-Microsoft) word prediction made it my favorite. It was also able to pick the correct word without me having to care about swiping over the right letters. It seemed to work just by the shape I was tracing.
This is what I use and just firewall it.
There is no live telemetry, you just email them the data when you are done.
I have to correct 50% of my words in my language (French). It keeps guessing words that don't exist. Example: I swipe "Donc" (then) and it guess "Do'c". What is that word?