Gboard can stop adding spaces when you don’t want it to

Earlier today, we discovered that Google is working on a potentially huge Gboard accessibility feature translate sign language captured by your phone’s camera converted to written text. This has the potential to make a real difference to people who use sign language, but that wasn’t the only change we saw. Google is also preparing one to write an option that, while smaller in impact, could be useful to a wider group of Gboard users by giving them more control over when the keyboard adds space.

Currently, Gboard automatically adds a space after you tap one of the words in the autocorrect suggestion bar. This is usually handy when you’re continuing a sentence, but it can allow you to remove unwanted space when you want to add punctuation or add something directly to a selected word. Like almost every aspect Android keyboardsthis is something that some users ideally like the ability to customize.

Google agrees. While tinkering with the app, we were able to enable the new “Auto-space after suggestions” toggle in Gboard’s Corrections and suggestions settings. The option lets you decide whether the keyboard should continue adding that space after you select a suggested word. You can see the link in the screenshot below.

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

The replacement isn’t available yet, and there’s no guarantee that Google will make it public. But given that this looks like a simple extra control for anyone who finds Gboard’s auto-spacing more annoying than useful, we’d be surprised if it didn’t make it into the stable version.