Gboard could soon stop adding spaces when you don’t want them

Earlier today, we revealed that Google is working on a potentially major Gboard accessibility feature that could translate sign language captured by your phone’s camera into written text. That has the potential to make a real difference for people who rely on sign language, but it wasn’t the only change we spotted. Google also appears to be preparing a typing option that, while smaller in terms of impact, could prove useful to a far wider group of Gboard users by giving them more control over when the keyboard adds a space.

Right now, Gboard automatically inserts a space after you tap one of the words in its autocorrect suggestion strip. That is usually handy when you’re continuing a sentence, but it can leave you deleting an unwanted gap when you want to add punctuation or attach something directly to the selected word. Just like almost every aspect of Android keyboards, it’s the kind of thing that some users would ideally like the ability to customize.

Google appears to agree. While tinkering in the app, we managed to activate a new ‘Auto-space after suggestions’ toggle in Gboard’s Corrections & suggestions settings. The option lets you decide whether the keyboard should continue adding that space after you choose a suggested word. You can see the toggle in the screenshot below.

The setting works as expected in our testing. Switching it off stops Gboard from inserting spaces, while leaving it enabled preserves the keyboard’s current behavior.

The toggle isn’t available yet, and there’s no guarantee Google will roll it out publicly. But if we speculate, given that this looks like a simple bit of extra control for anyone who finds Gboard’s automatic spacing more annoying than helpful, we’d be surprised if it doesn’t make it to a stable version.