Keyman Update for 31 January 2025

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the period from 20 January 2025 — 31 January 2025. 

The Keyman team is now preparing for beta release of Keyman 18. The beta release cycle is expected to last about 10 weeks, during which the team will be focusing on quality improvements to Keyman and tidying up loose ends from Keyman 18. If you have any feedback, please share it on our community site. A blog post will be published shortly with details on the significant changes coming in Keyman 18.

As always, you can follow all of our development online at github.com/keymanapp/keyman, and you may find the Keyman Development Status Site at status.keyman.com both interesting and slightly overwhelming!

Keyman minor releases

Keyman 17.0.334 stable was released in this cycle. There are a couple of notable changes: 

• Android
  • Disable installation of Keyman keyboards through external sources due to tightened permissions in Android — instead install keyboards within the Keyman app itself (#13005).
• Web
  • Prevent spurious multitap warnings on modifier keys with gesture (#12974).

Keyman 18.0.173 alpha through 18.0.181 alpha were also released in this cycle. Significant updates in these versions include:

• Keyman Developer
  • Clone existing keyboard and lexical model projects, both from local file system and also from any open source online Keyman keyboard in Keyman Cloud or GitHub (#13076, #12982,  #12979, #12973).
  • Further development for kmc-generate (#12955, #12958, #12960, #12962, #12966, #12971).
  • Support &displayMap font in web debugger (#12929).
  • New npm module @keymanapp/langtags makes langtags.json easily accessible (#13046).
• Windows
  • Improvements to automated installation of Keyman and keyboard updates (#12948, #13025).
• macOS
  • Make the On Screen Keyboard work more consistently (#12988).
• Linux
  • Compatibility improvements with Keyman for Gentoo (#13070).
• iOS
  • Documentation for Gesture Hints and Tips (#12900).
• Web
  • Correct the behavior of enabling word correction (#13066).
  • Disable incorrect highlighting automatically accepted predictive words (#13068).
• Localization
  • More translation for Portuguese (#13056).
  • Further localization for Spanish (Latin America) (#13044).

The full list of updates can be viewed in the version history.

Keyboard updates

New keyboards:

• Huge thanks to Harshavardhan-Pandurangan for creating these 2 keyboards: 
  • A new slp1_deva keyboard which supports the Devanagari script (#3265, #3297) 
  • A new slp1_roman keyboard which support the Latin script (#3298)
• A new Easy Arabic keyboard for Arabic thanks to Caliph3ubaidUrRe7man  (#3300)
• A new Old Hungarian (Carpathian Highlands) keyboard for  people who use the Slovak keyboard layout (#3309)

Keyboards enhancement:

• farsiman keyboard v1.0.1: updated font and keycaps (#3307)
• cantonese telex keyboard v2.0: changed alphabets and use Z key to cancel tones, thanks to Cathaylaboratory (#3295)

Predictive text dictionary updates

• A new predictive tex dictionary for Burushaski Latin script, thanks to quwatsunny (#295)
• A new predictive text dictionary for Chechen language, thanks to gushmazuko (#296)