how about they just give us a Ctrl key, and strangely enough, almost every shortcut become available
Ooo I really like this idea. Really it just needs to be a keyboard with a bunch of controls. The control button would change the mode of the keyboard.
They kind of already have this for the symbols keyboard where it can switch to a finance mode with basic algebraic characters.
some Android OSKs have Ctrl button, like Unexpected Keyboard (it’s FOSS), it’s also my choice.
downside, there is absolutely no dictionary and autocorrect but it’s absolutely marvelous, have all the keys and pretty configurable. has a bit of learning curve, since you swipe on keys to access more keys rather holding it down but this makes it powerful IMO
It’s only available for the Japanese keyboard. You can switch if you need to undo, but that sounds tedious. Come on Google, just give us an undo button!
A shake to undo gesture would be nice.
I do not want motion controls on my phone
I had an iPhone with that ages ago and it was so annoying when in a car or on a train
No, on iOS Apple can fine tune it because they only have an handful of phones to support. On Android they can’t, and “one setting for all” will lead to a disaster experience like “everything gets deleted while typing in a bus” because the phone thinks you’re shaking to undo
As long as it’s possible to turn off the shake and do it with a button. Motion controls are not accessibility friendly.
That sounds like a lot of struggle over something the predictive text bar already does ? In my experience when you delete a word, or a whole sentence, it’ll be the only suggestions from the predictive bar at the top of the keyboard. Tap that suggestion and you get your stuff back.
But yeah type another letter and you are fucked…
I’ve used Florisboard on my device for a few years now, and completely shocked at how barebones the stock Android and Samsung keyboards are…
It can undo, redo, cut, paste, select all, view/insert clipboard history, clear clipboard, and swipe to move the cursor within text. Standard stuff like voice input and swipe typing are here too.
Admittedly it’s not perfect, and probably not ideal for most casual users in its current state, but I just can’t go back to a standard keyboard after using this feature rich one for so long
I tried so hard to stick to Florisboard but gboard is waaay too convenient that I keep going back to it. I wish Florisboard at least adds feature to search among emojis.
Standard stuff like voice input and swipe typing are here too.
How do you turn on swipe typing? And autocorrect, for that matter?
Oh, you need to install the version marked “beta”. Still a pretty terrible typing experience from what I can tell.
So… even after setting it up, I have to switch keyboards before I can undo, then switch back (or continue typing in Japanese)? I’ll just retype while waiting for the official solution…
EDIT: Just today, I noticed that when I mass-delete by swiping left on the keyboard it deletes (obviously), but moves the text to the auto complete bar!? This is a single tap to restore which is way faster than the method in the article. Is this Google’s implementation or a Pixel-exclusive preview feature?
Nope, that’s been part of Gboard forever.
Gboard is frustrating because it’s the best keyboard I’ve found, but it also has so much obvious room for improvement, but Google had hardly worked on it at all for years. For example, the way it handles ellipses and hyphens makes you fight the keyboard if you want to follow the rules of written English.
Okay, that’s good to know. And I agree. I think many of Google’s apps these days are pretty much fine, but they don’t put the effort in to fix obvious things to get them over the line to “great”!
This is the general implementation that google has deployed for android.
For anybody using Xposed/LSPosed, there’s an Undo module that gives you undo and redo in the text edit context menu (the one with copy and paste).
Samsung’s keyboard has a CTRL key on their Tab line. Not sure if that extends to foldables.
Yeah I just call it backspace