While some still yearn for physical keyboards to make a comeback, I think it’s almost impossible to compete with the flexibility of virtual keyboards. Gboard is the one I always come back to, and I recently discovered a new feature that makes it even better.
I’ve genuinely tried to give physical keyboards a chance, but they’re just not for me. The idea of a virtual keyboard that appears when you need it, disappears when you don’t, and can adapt to your needs at the moment has always made sense to me. Case in point: number keys.
Flick to enter numbers and symbols
A faster way to enter secondary keys
Now, everyone knows Gboard has multiple keyboards for all the various keys you might need. The one you usually see is the standard QWERTY with spacebar, comma, period, and emoji key. Then you’ve got a second keyboard for numbers, common punctuation, and symbols. There’s also a third keyboard for rarely used characters.
Switching between these different keyboards is easy, but there are a couple of options to make accessing secondary keys even easier. First, you can toggle on “Touch & hold keys for symbols.” This puts numbers and common punctuation on the QWERTY keyboard, and you can access them by long-pressing a key.
The second option is newer and not as well-known. It’s located right underneath the “Touch & hold keys for symbols” option, called “Flick keys to enter symbols.” The description says, “Touch a key and pull downward to enter its hinted symbol.” I find this gesture to be much better than touching and holding. See for yourself in the GIFs below.
What makes this gesture so good is the fact that you barely have to touch the key to do it. Simply flick down on a key, and the secondary character is entered. If you use glide typing, like me, it takes a nanosecond pause to activate the gesture, but it’s still much faster than long-pressing.
I don’t need the number row anymore
Virtual keyboards win again
The first thing I enable with every fresh install of Gboard is the number row. It has been a must-have feature in any keyboard app that I’ve tried for many years, and it was something that made my time with a physical keyboard so frustrating. However, I’m not sure I need it anymore.
See, if there’s one knock against virtual keyboards, it’s that they cover content on the screen when opened. This is a bit more of a nuisance for me as someone with large hands. I slide the Gboard keyboard higher up to make it more comfortable, but that means it’s blocking almost half of the screen. The number row obviously doesn’t help.
For the record, I think you still get to see more content on the screen with a virtual keyboard than on those devices with physical keyboards, but that’s beside the point.
Since the flick gesture works so quickly and effortlessly, I don’t feel the need to use the number row anymore. It’s a small thing, sure, but I’m happy to get some of my screen back.
Make the most of the Gboard flick keys gesture
If you’re ready to head off and enable this new gesture (Gboard settings > Preferences), I have a couple of tips to ensure it works well. First, to use the gesture for more than numbers, you need to enable “Touch & hold keys for symbols” as well. When disabled, only the numbers can be flicked.
Second, if the gesture doesn’t seem to be working as well as you’d like, take a look at “Flick input sensitivity” right underneath the toggle in the settings. You can slide it from low, mid-low, normal, mid-high, to high.
Lastly, you might feel like the gesture isn’t working at all if you have glide typing enabled. I briefly mentioned that glide typing requires a slightly longer touch before swiping down on the key, and I really do mean slight. You only have to pause for a millisecond before flicking—input sensitivity can help here, too.
All in all, it’s a simple gesture that makes a great virtual keyboard even easier to use. I’m happy to see Google still improving the far and away most popular Android keyboard.
