Keyman 14.0 is now available!

We have just released Keyman 14.0!

As we said in our last blog post, we have been working hard over the last year to improve the quality of Keyman. We’ve fixed hundreds of bugs and made many small changes to different parts of the software to improve your experience using it. In this blog post, we’d like to highlight just a few of the changes we made.

If you haven’t already done so, go back and take a look at our Keyman 14 beta overview. Pretty much everything we wrote there still applies, so we’ll try not to repeat ourselves too much here!

Read more about all the changes at the launch page for Keyman 14.0.

Please do join our Keyman 14 Launch Webinar Series running from 29 March to 1 April 2021.

A small note before we get into the other new features: we have renamed Keyman Desktop to Keyman for Windows, which we feel is a little more consistent, now that Keyman is available on so many platforms. We’ll probably just call it Keyman most of the time, as we always have!

Improved integration in Keyman for Windows

In our beta announcement, we noted that Keyman keyboards are always listed in the Windows language picker, even if Keyman is not running. And then we said that Keyman would restart automatically if you selected a Keyman keyboard. We’ve had to disable this functionality for the release because it was not quite stable enough to be ready for everyday use. But the integration overall is still much better than previously!

Keyman for Windows no longer needs Internet Explorer

It can take some effort to encourage an application to let go of a long-held dependency. But with a lot of gentle persuasion, we were able to convince Keyman for Windows to stop depending on Internet Explorer, and have introduced it instead to Chromium, which is the internal engine of the Chrome browser. We bundle Chromium with Keyman, so this removes the last install dependency for Keyman on Windows.

An improved Keyman Setup on Windows

We internally call Keyman Setup the “bootstrapper”, which comes from the idea of “lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps”. Our bootstrapper is pretty clever, but we’re don’t think it has discovered the secret of antigravity yet. But if you see a flying installer around, let us know! The bootstrap program makes it much easier to bundle Keyman with keyboard layouts and share it with other users, and automatically configure Keyman with specific keyboards and languages. This is a big deal for technical support staff. Learn more here!

Predictive Text

We now handle capital letters somewhat better with text predictions — if you type a capital H, you’ll be offered Hello and not hello!

Keyman for Android

We are happy to say that Keyman 14 works much better with the messaging apps WeChat and Telegram: we solved the big blank box bug. The menus for installing keyboards are somewhat clearer, and the embedded browser is much snappier when typing. Also, the touch keyboard appears more quickly and the predictive text banner pops up snappily.

Keyman for iOS

The touch keyboard pops onto the display more quickly and with less fuss — and just like with Keyman for Android, the predictive text banner appears when needed, just like a genie. (Beware, because just like a genie, predictive text has been known to misinterpret your intentions!)

Keyman for Linux

We’ve added support for Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy), and improved support for desktop environments KDE and Gnome. As a convenience, you can now double-click on a .kmp file to install keyboard packages via Keyman Config.

Keyman for macOS

On macOS, we’ve made some improvements to stability and compatibility — particularly with Java-based applications — and made context tracking more reliable when using cursor keys.

Development Tool Improvements

We’ve added two new language features: range expansions using the .. operator, and the &CasedKeys store for controlling Caps Lock.

The touch layout editor has added some more special key caps, some for right-to-left languages, such as *RTLEnter*, and some others, such as *ZWNJ*.

We’ve got a bunch of changes to the Keyman Engine APIs, which are documented on our launch site.

Get Involved

We’d love to have you involved in the project. There are many ways you can help: get involved in the Keyman project now!

14.0 Feedback

Again, read more about all the changes at the launch page for Keyman 14.0.

Please send feedback about Keyman 14 to the Keyman Community site or submit bugs and feature requests to our Issue Tracker.