For me, the key is FOSS. I was a keen fan of swiftkey, its word predictions worked great. Then it was bought by a company that I distrust, and when I was forced to choose another, I decided to try to ensure I’d never have to switch again.
A little while after I bailed on swiftkey, the news reports came that it was auto-filling random strangers’ credit card numbers; I felt vindicated.
I’ve got three soft keyboards enabled on my phone, to choose between as needed.
Unexpected Keyboard is my default; it’s a perfectly cromulent basic keyboard, that makes all the punctuation, ctrl/fn/esc available for comfy shell work.
When I need to type in non-ascii characters like accented letters, I have AnySoft available. And pwsafe has a soft keyboard in it to let me avoid passing my (exceedingly hard to type, long random) passwords through the clipboard.
I used to have Hacker’s Keyboard in the mix, but Unexpected Keyboard has made it unnecessary.
With “Unexpected Keyboard” (from f-droid) it’s ok. I’ve come to expect that there’s a basic choice between easy, with GUI, and powerful (like “sort a region of lines”), which is only GUI if you’ve got a powerful GUI, like plan 9. Otherwise, powerful means keyboard-driven.
When I’ve got a long, complex edit, I’ve got a nice, pocket-size, battery-powered folding bluetooth keyboard; combined with the kickstands on my phone cases, it is pretty good.
I use jove (a small, lightweight emacs) within Termux, and M-X filter-region through sort
I’d love one. Preferably the opens-like-a-book style, not the vertical ribbon.
But I don’t want to carry around something that costs that much. They’re currently priced for someone with way more money.
I’m in a similar situation. My Pixel3 is the only phone I have that can install a banking app, but my Nexus 6 still gets monthly security updates via LineageOS. Since Google wants me to repla e phones every few years, when one of these dies, I’m getting an A14 5G. On a cost per year of running everything including apps that block custom ROMs, Pixels are far too pricey. I think they envy Apple their pricing, but don’t do support.
And as long as I’ll have to get a phone, I want newer radios.
Hooray, it includes SingleFile!