I don’t use my phone to type for long hours for my work, and all my colleagues share the same sentiment about typing on a virtual keyboard.
However, they have different reasons for choosing a physical keyboard over a virtual one for professional work.
I probably sit on the extreme side, because I dislike pretty much everything about typing on a virtual keyboard on a phone. It gets too many things wrong, and most of the time it’s not even my fault.
While virtual keyboards aren’t good enough yet to compete with physical ones, some on-screen keyboards do make things a bit easier for you to type on a phone for long periods.
Gboard is one such app. I rate it slightly higher than many of the best-quality keyboard apps, despite it not always performing up to the mark.
I’ll admit that there is a personal bias towards it. I have a soft corner for Gboard because it has fixed my biggest typing fear on Android phones.
The typing mistake that I was afraid of on Android
Writing is a satisfying job, but sometimes it takes significant effort to nail even one sentence. You write, delete, and rewrite, and repeat until you finish your draft.
In the process, I keep accidentally deleting items that I never intended to, because it’s a bit tricky to lift my finger off the backspace key at just the right time.
However, I don’t have to worry about accidental deletions when I’m typing on my laptop, because the Ctrl+Z shortcut is always there for rescue. The keyboard shortcut restores what I’ve just deleted.
On the contrary, I remember losing an entire paragraph while typing on my Samsung Galaxy S21 a couple of years ago. That was the breaking point: I never went back to typing on my phone for writing articles.
I’ll admit that it wasn’t the only issue that discouraged me from typing on my phone for writing articles, but being unable to restore those accidental deletions was my biggest typing fear on Android.
How Gboard’s undo button fixed my biggest typing fear on Android
Gboard didn’t make me eat my words about on-screen keyboards, but it did fix my biggest typing fear. All thanks to the hidden Undo button.
Gboard’s Undo button launched earlier this year, but I spotted it a few months ago while typing a message on WhatsApp.
You don’t have to dig deep through the menu to access the Undo button. It’s available in Gboard’s menu button (also known as the four-square menu), which appears on the left side within the suggestion strip.
After deleting a sentence or a word, you open the menu button and click the Undo button to restore what you’ve just deleted. It also displays a Redo button right beside the Undo option to help you reverse your undo action.
However, that’s not how I use the feature. You can bypass the extra step of opening the menu button to undo accidental deletions.
For this to work, you’ll need to hold the Back key on your phone for a couple of seconds more after deleting the sentence, instead of lifting your thumb off the Back key soon after the deletion.
After you restore it, Gboard will immediately display the Redo option on the suggestion bar in case you want to reverse your action.
It takes a bit of practice to nail it, but after you develop muscle memory, it’s the most efficient way of restoring accidentally deleted sentences.
If you accidentally delete a word, the above trick won’t work. In that case, the only way to reverse it is to do it through the Menu button. So, it’s worth remembering when to use what.
The Undo button alone doesn’t remedy all the unique issues that plague the overall typing experience on a virtual keyboard.
However, with Gboard, I can at least type without the fear of losing sentences to inevitable mistakes.
Gboard helps me type with confidence on my Android phone
Gboard’s autocorrect feature isn’t perfect, but it still works for me most of the time.
Maybe it’s because I type far less on my phone. However short the duration, I type with confidence with Gboard on Android.
My mantra for the best typing experience is simple: don’t rely too much on autocorrect. When I type something, I always skim through it to find any spelling or grammar mistakes I may have made.
When I spot them, all I have to do is tap the space bar and swipe left or right to place the cursor where the mistake is.
This is a far better and more efficient way of correcting mistakes than taping the misspelled word, because the latter often moves the cursor to the wrong place.
The Undo button is the cherry on top. If I mistakenly delete something that doesn’t contain any errors, I can quickly rectify it using the Undo button.
I type confidently on my Android, not because Gboard doesn’t allow me to make mistakes, but because I can afford to make them and don’t worry about spending more time than I should. Fixing them feels that effortless.