External Keyboard want to show only word predictions

I am using an external keyboard and want to hide the Swiftkey keyboard, but show the word prediction bar.  Doesn’t sound like much, but on the bar you can see the ios text replacements you have entered.  While showing the keyboard, I can type a short combination of letters and/or numbers, which ios translates to a whole paragraph.  I use this quite often filling in templates and sending emails, but it is annoying to see this huge keyboard that takes up a large portion of the screen.