7 Useful Gboard Settings That Will Make Your Typing Easier

 7 Useful Gboard Settings That Will Make Your Typing Easier

Google's Gboard is the default keyboard for most Android users. But many may not be aware of the useful settings hidden in it.

These settings can significantly increase your typing speed and productivity. If you are using only the default settings of Gboard so far, you may be missing out on many of its useful features.

Here are 7 such useful Gboard settings that you can activate to take your typing experience to the next level.

1. Reduce Key Long-Press Delay

When you long-press a letter, other symbols or letters related to it appear. By default, this menu takes about 300 milliseconds to appear. If you use symbols or special characters and letters frequently, reducing this time will speed up your typing.

To do this, go to Gboard's Settings > Preferences and tap on Key long press delay or Touch and hold duration. Here, you can use the slider to reduce the delay time to 100 milliseconds. This will save you time on each long-press.

2. Power Up Your Clipboard

Gboard's clipboard saves your recently copied text, links, and images for up to an hour. But you can make it even more powerful.

If you need to paste an address, phone number, or email frequently, you can pin it to the clipboard. Pinned items do not get deleted even after an hour. To do this, open the clipboard that appears at the top of Gboard, long-press on an item, and select the Pin option.

You can also make the clipboard content visible in the suggestion bar. For this, go to Gboard's Settings > Clipboard and turn on 'Show recently copied text and images in suggestions bar'. By doing this, whenever you copy any text or image, the option to paste appears in the suggestion bar at the top of the keyboard, which makes the work much faster.

3. Use the personal dictionary as a text expander

If you repeatedly type the same long phrase, email address, or home address, then Gboard's personal dictionary can be very useful for you. You can use it as a powerful text expander.

For this, you can create a short shortcut for long phrases by going to Dictionary in Gboard's Settings and then Personal dictionary. For example, if you have a shortcut like 'myemail' for your full email address, the next time you type 'myemail', your full email will appear in the suggestion bar. Which can be inserted with a single tap.

4. Customize your toolbar

The toolbar at the top of the Gboard keyboard has various shortcuts, such as GIF, Settings, Clipboard, and Translate. You can rearrange these shortcuts according to your needs.

Arrange them according to your preferences by pressing the icons on the toolbar and moving them left and right. Keeping the 5 shortcuts you use most at the front makes your work faster and easier.

5. Make Glide Typing Easier

Glide typing (typing by swiping without lifting your finger) is a popular feature of Gboard. But some settings can make it more effective. Go to Glide typing in Gboard Settings and turn on two options.

The first of which is the Show gesture trail option, which shows the path of your finger as you swipe. This increases accuracy. Similarly, after turning on the Enable gesture delete feature, you can delete multiple words at once by swiping left from the backspace key.

6. Suggestions for emoji and stickers

It can take time to find the right emoji or sticker. Gboard automatically suggests relevant emojis, GIFs, and stickers based on the text you're typing.

To do this, go to Emojis, Stickers & GIFs under Gboard's Settings and turn on 'Predictive content search'. You can also turn on 'Emoji fast-access row', which adds a separate row of emojis you use frequently at the top of the keyboard.

7. Create a keyboard theme using your own photo

Gboard comes with a variety of color and landscape themes. But you can also use your own photo as a background to make your keyboard even more personal.

Go to Gboard Settings and tap on the + icon under 'My themes'. From here, choose any photo from your gallery, adjust its brightness, and decide whether to have key borders or not. This gives your keyboard a unique and personal look.