Gboard Features Most People Never Turn On

Gboard ships on most Android phones and is available on iOS. Its defaults are conservative, and several genuinely useful features sit behind a settings screen nobody opens.

Cursor control by sliding the space bar

Placing the cursor precisely by tapping is fiddly. Hold the space bar and slide left or right, and the cursor moves character by character.

This is the single most useful thing in this article, it works everywhere, and almost nobody knows it exists.

For selecting rather than moving, hold shift while sliding.

The clipboard manager

Gboard keeps recent clipboard entries. Tap the clipboard icon in the toolbar above the keys, and everything you have copied recently is there.

Turn it on in Gboard settings, Clipboard, then Show recent copies. Once enabled, copied text is retained for about an hour unless you pin it.

Pinning keeps an entry indefinitely. Useful for an address, a bank account number, a frequently pasted block of text.

Copied text is stored on the device, and Gboard specifically avoids syncing it. Still worth knowing that anything you copy — including passwords pasted from a manager — may briefly appear in this list. Password managers usually mark their clipboard content to be excluded, but not all apps do.

Text editing mode

The toolbar has a text editing icon that opens a small editing panel with arrow keys, select-all, cut, copy, paste and undo.

For editing an existing paragraph on a phone, this is far quicker than tapping at the text.

One-handed and floating modes

Long-press the comma key, or open the toolbar, and switch the keyboard to one-handed mode. It shrinks and moves to one side, with a button to switch sides.

Floating mode detaches the keyboard entirely so you can position it anywhere — useful on a tablet or a very large phone.

Glide typing and its erase gesture

Glide typing is on by default. Two related gestures are not obvious:

Swipe left on the delete key to delete whole words rather than characters. Keep sliding to delete more.

Swipe from the delete key and release to undo the deletion if you went too far.

Offline translation

Gboard can translate as you type, in any app. Tap the translate icon, choose the languages, and what you type is converted in place.

Download the language packs in Gboard settings so it works without a connection. The quality is adequate for short messages rather than for anything careful.

Voice typing, offline

On recent Pixel devices and increasingly elsewhere, voice typing runs on the device and works with no connection at all. It handles punctuation commands and is considerably faster than the older server-based version.

Download the offline speech package in Settings, System, Languages and input, so that it works in flight mode.

Personal dictionary

Gboard learns from what you type, and you can also add entries directly.

Settings, Dictionary, Personal dictionary. Add a word and, optionally, a shortcut. Typing the shortcut suggests the full text — useful for email addresses, long names, and any phrase you type repeatedly.

This is a text-expansion feature that most people install a separate app for.

Number row

Off by default. Gboard settings, Preferences, Number row. It costs a small amount of screen height and removes a keypress from every number you type.

Turning off what you do not want

Emoji suggestions and sticker suggestions in the suggestion strip can be disabled if they get in the way of word predictions.

Personalisation can be switched off in Gboard settings under Privacy if you would rather the keyboard did not learn from your typing. Note that this reduces prediction quality noticeably.

Delete learned words is in the same area, and is worth doing if you have typed something sensitive that now appears as a suggestion.

What Gboard sends

Worth being straight about, since a keyboard sees everything you type.

Gboard states that what you type stays on the device except for searches you deliberately make through the keyboard, and features you explicitly use such as translation. Federated learning is used to improve models without sending raw text.

If you are uncomfortable with any of that, the settings above reduce it, and there are open-source keyboards that make no network requests at all — at the cost of prediction quality and features.

Quick wins

If you change nothing else: enable the number row, enable the clipboard, and learn the space bar slide. Those three take a minute and you will use them daily.

Mistakes people make

Not enabling the clipboard, then installing a clipboard manager app that needs broad permissions to do what the keyboard already does.

Pasting passwords with clipboard history on. Reputable password managers mark their clipboard content to be excluded; not every app does.

Using only the left shift key, which forces awkward hand movements for half the alphabet.

Installing a third-party keyboard without checking what it sends. A keyboard sees everything you type, including passwords. This is the single most sensitive permission on a phone.

Ignoring the personal dictionary, then typing the same long address a hundred times.

The short answer

Enable the number row and the clipboard, learn the space-bar slide for cursor control, and add your recurring words to the personal dictionary. Three changes, one minute, used every day.