Gboard is the world’s most popular mobile keyboard. It comes pre-installed on all Android devices and is the keyboard of choice for billions of people. You might not have bothered to go into its settings before because it works fine from the start, but there are ways you can make it a little more useful.
In this guide, we’ll go over some of the major Gboard settings that you should change immediately.
1. Reduce Key Long-Press Delay
You can know how long pressing a key opens a small pop-up menu on your keyboard where you can access additional contextual keys. For example, if you long-press a vowel, you may see variations of that letter with different accent marks. Long-pressing the period key shows you a bunch of other symbols and special characters.
Since it’s common to long-press a key while using the keyboard, it’s a good idea to reduce the delay between your keypress and the pop-up of a menu. Here’s how to do it:
- Launch Gboard and go to Settings > Preferences,
- Scroll down and tap key long press delay,
- Adjust the delay using the slider that suits you best, then tap Ok,
The delay is set to 300 milliseconds by default. You can decrease it to 100 milliseconds or increase it to 700 milliseconds. The lower the delay, the more time you save on each long-press.
2. Show Emoji Keys to Access Emoji Faster
By default, the way to access emoji on Gboard is by long-pressing the comma key next to the spacebar. But if you use emoji frequently while typing then it can take too much time.
makeup video of the day
Luckily, you can set your Google Keyboard to show the emoji keys separately for quick access. just go Settings > Preferences and toggle show emoji switch key, Now, when you launch the keyboard again, you will see a separate emoji key next to the comma key. To make room for this, the spacebar will shrink slightly in size.
3. Improve Your Auto-Correction Settings
One of the cool things about Gboard is how it learns your usage patterns over time. This allows it to make more precise corrections and give you better suggestions as you type. There are a whole set of small but nice text correction settings that you can tweak on Gboard. you can reach these text correction Menu.
Some useful text correction settings you should turn on are:
- show suggestion bar
- next word suggestions
- auto correction
- Undo AutoCorrect on Backspace
- auto capitalization
- double-space period
4. Glide Make Typing Easier
Similar to text correction, there are two Glide typing settings you should check out. you can reach these glide typing Menu. This:
- Show Gesture Trail: Creates a line that follows the gliding motion of your finger on the keyboard. It helps in increasing the accuracy while writing. you need to have glide typing Enabled to be able to use this setting.
- Enable Gesture Delete: Quickly delete one or more words by sliding them to the left with the delete key. The further you slide your finger on the screen, the more words are selected; Then, lift your finger to remove. This helps in saving time by not having to long press the delete key to delete one character at a time.
5. Add words to your personal dictionary
You may know and use some words in your daily life that your Google keyboard doesn’t recognize and therefore can’t predict when you’re glide-typing. And it’s really annoying to have to type those words letter-by-letter, only to then auto-correct it to something else entirely.
To solve this, you need to teach Gboard to recognize these words. You can do this by adding words to your personal dictionary. Here’s how it works:
- go for Settings > Dictionaries > Personal Dictionary And choose your preferred language.
- At the top corner, tap Add (,) switch.
- On the following screen, type the word you want to add.
- For added convenience, you can even add a shortcut to your added words if they’re long or hard to glide-type. For example, the name “Hillary Meadows” might contain “snow” as a shortcut. Now, when you glide-type the shortcut on your keyboard, it will automatically type out the entire word for you.
You can also use shortcuts to quickly type in email addresses, web addresses, or even complete sentences. For example, “[email protected]” could be “ajmuo”. Similarly, “Are you free this weekend?” Might be “freeweek”. Remember, always use made-up words as shortcuts.
6. Extend Your Clipboard
Under clipboard menu, turn on the following two settings:
- Show recently copied text and images in the suggestion bar: When you copy a piece of text or an image, the next time you open the keyboard, Gboard will show you it as a pill-shaped button in the suggestion bar, so you can tap it and quickly move the copied item to the text field. to paste from. , It helps to save time by not having to long press the text field and select Paste it every time.
- Save recent screenshots to clipboard: When you take a screenshot on your device, Gboard will save it to the clipboard and show you a button to paste it directly into the text field.
You can also set Gboard to hide addresses and phone numbers from the clipboard. Simply toggle off the feature from the same menu.
The contents of your clipboard are automatically deleted after one hour. To save an item, long-press and tap on it pin,
7. Get Emoji & Sticker Suggestions
Lastly, you can get suggestions for emoji and stickers, or more quickly access the ones you use the most. Under Emoji, Stickers and GIFs menu, toggle on the following settings:
- Emoji fast-access row: Adds an extra row at the top of the keyboard, showing the popular and most used emoji.
- Predictive Content Search: Gboard will suggest relevant GIFs, emoji and stickers based on your text.
- emoji stickers: Suggests relevant stickers based on the emoji you choose.
Help Gboard communicate better
Gboard works great from day one and its default settings are very user-friendly. But if you want to make the most of it, turning on the above settings can help you save time, express yourself better, and boost your productivity a bit. There are other settings you may want to play around with and see how well they work for you.
Gboard is one of the many popular Google apps installed on your phone. Among others, there are some very useful widgets that are worth putting on your home screen.
6 Really Useful Google Widgets to Add to Your Android Home Screen
Read next
About the Author
Ayush Jalan (163 articles published)
Aayush is a tech-enthusiast and has an academic background in marketing. He enjoys learning about the latest technologies that expand human potential and challenge the status quo. Apart from his working life, he enjoys writing poetry, songs and indulging in creative philosophy.
Other Ayush Jalana Movies & TV Shows
Subscribe to our newsletter
Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free eBooks and exclusive deals!
Please click here to subscribe
