How to disable the annoying keyboard suggestions in Sailfish OS?

Question

In the standard Sailfish OS keyboard there's this autosuggestion feature, which means well, but can be really annoying, e.g. duplicating parts of the word being edited, etc. The UI does not provide any way to disable this feature. Can it be done by editing system files?

Answer 1

The following applies to Sailfish OS 2 on an Intex AquaFish device. It's largely the same on other devices running version 2, but I have no way of checking Sailfish OS v3. The autosuggestion feature is configured in the configuration file /usr/share/maliit/plugins/com/jolla/Xt9InputHandler.qml. Open it in your editor of choice. It contains a JSON-like structure of nested items. Find the following path:

InputHandler.(topItem:  component).TopItem.SilicaListView.(delegate: BackgroundItem)

In there, locate

onClicked: applyPrediction(model.text, model.index)

and comment it out by prepending //. Then find the object Text (should be just a couple lines below) and inside it comment out the item:

text: formatText(model.text)

What remains now is to restart the Maliit keyboard service:

systemctl --user restart maliit-server.service

and verify that the keyboard no longer chops your writing.