Word endings / plural

Question

In many languages word endings are adjusted. E.g. the plural s in English. (In other languages there are often many more.) GBoard often doesn't suggest these variations.

E.g. when I tap on the word suggestion 'language', the cursor stay right after the last letter. But when I tap on 's', GBoard will add a space and then 's'. This way I get "language s".

1. Why does GBoard insert the space only in last second? Seems counter-intuitive. Is there a reason?

2. Is there a trick to using a word suggestion and immediately modifying it? (Currently I always use space, backspace and then type the word ending.)

Answer 1

Gboard's "glide typing" is designed to allow typing words without worrying about inserting spaces, so when we want plural we just have to type the plural of the word rather than the singular.

Workarounds other than 'space-delete-s' would be disabling glide typing and using old school tap-to-type where every key requires explicit pressing or using the "gesture cursor control" to move the cursor around and then back to the end of the word before pressing 's'.

There may be a third-party keyboard that would allow a custom preference for this, and it may also be possible to modify Gboard to behave this way, but it may not be as useful as hoped.

For an example of what it would be like you could try enabling double-space-period and typing anything using multiple spaces throughout. You would normally only press space half as many times, but you'd be pressing it a lot more often if it was not inserted automatically. The cursor-control workaround still works, but the delete workaround fails although 3+ taps of space becomes period-space-space (etc).