This is an update from our last Roadmap blog post in September 2023.

Please share any feedback you have on this post on our Community Forum.

Older versions of the roadmap

• May 2018
• October 2018
• February 2019
• November 2019
• March 2020
• March 2022
• February 2023
• September 2023

Get Involved

We need your help! The team has continued to grow, but so has the need! Please take a look at our Getting Involved pages for how you can help make Keyman work better for you, your language community and others:

• Make a donation
• Create a keyboard layout for your language
• Localize Keyman for your language
• Support other users
• Test a new version
• Write some code
• Improve the documentation
• Join the team!

We have a current need for software developers and writers:

• Typescript developer
• iOS (or macOS) developer
• Team lead
• Technical writer

If you have skills in any of these areas and think you’d like to get involved, please get in touch!

The Roadmap

The Keyman team met online (due to budget constraints) in April 2025 to plan out version 19 and future versions.

We continue our push on the CLDR Keyboard Specification — in particular, working to integrate CLDR Keyboard support into Keyman on Android, iOS and Web. This is the headline feature planned for version 19.0.

When you look back at our roadmap for version 18.0, you’ll see that the roadmap looks somewhat different to what actually made it into the release. We did manage to finish several smaller projects, and opted to release version 18.0 in order to make this new functionality available, while continuing on the projects that we had already started, with plans to release these in version 19.0.

We have adjusted the priorities of a number of features, largely in response to the availability of resources to move them forward. For example, the LDML Keyboard Editor and Web-based keyboard IDE are currently on hold. Watch this space.

Version 19

The version 19 release cycle will be a fairly long one. In part, this is because a number of team members are changing locations and will have downtime while they transition to new countries. Funding constraints have slowed our pace of development on some major features. However, many of the features listed below are already in development, and we do expect most of them to land in version 19.

The features we have planned for version 19, at this stage, are:

CLDR/LDML keyboards

• epic/web-core The Keyman Core Web interface allows us to support CLDR keyboards on mobile and tablet devices, as well as online in websites.

Desktop products

• epic/arm-windows As Windows on ARM64 becomes more popular, we plan to include support for ARM64 in Keyman Engine for Windows.
• epic/mac-config-app Redesign for a smoother installation and configuration experience
• epic/mcompile-linux integrate mnemonic layout support for Linux
• epic/mcompile-mac integrate mnemonic layout support for macOS

Predictive Text

• epic/autocorrect Automatically accept high-probability suggestions
• epic/user-dict User dictionaries for predictive text
• epic/model-encoding Improve performance and memory usage when handling large predictive text dictionaries
• epic/dict-breaker Improve wordbreaking support for South-East Asian languages

Internationalization and Localization

• epic/website-i18n Localize key pages on keyman.com and help.keyman.com
• epic/docs-i18n Support localization of documentation for Keyman products
• epic/welcome-i18n Support localization of keyboard documentation

Keyboard authoring

• epic/embed-osk-in-kmx Infrastructure to support a single compiled file format for keyboards, .kmx
• epic/shared-fonts Support for downloading remote fonts when building keyboards
• epic/ng-compiler Rewrite of the .kmn compiler with modern compiler practices
• epic/kmc-convert Import and export of various keyboard file formats
• epic/kmc-test Integrated automated testing of Keyman and LDML keyboards
• epic/single-keyboard-repos First-class support for standardized layout of keyboard repositories
• epic/kmw-on-npm provide Keyman Engine for Web as an NPM package npm distribution

Design specifications for upcoming versions

• Input Method eXtensions (IMX)
• Predictive text learning, phrases, morphological models
• Emoji picker

Version 20

Most of the items we had planned for version 19 in our previous roadmap have now been rolled over to version 20.

• Lexical models: Better control over short (1-3 letter) suggestions
• All platforms: Improved BCP47 support, Emoji picker

Keyman Developer – Keyboard Development Tools

• git + GitHub integration
• epic/dev-web-ui Keyman Developer web-based user interface transition
• epic/ldml-ide LDML Keyboard Editor in Keyman Developer

On Screen Keyboard

We continue to plan for a significant rework of On Screen Keyboard support, for all platforms. This includes styling, themes, consistency across platforms, and more ways to present characters on key caps. We will also examine possibilities for dynamic On Screen Keyboard functionality and feedback mechanisms.

Predictive Text – morphological models and phrases

We will continue to focus on predictive text features. Our target areas are morphological models and phrase support, with perhaps some limited learning.

Input Method eXtensions (IMX)

Input method extensions make it possible to add extra user interface elements, and more sophisticated algorithms, including dictionary lookups, learning and more, to a Keyman keyboard layout. While we have supported IMX on Windows (and to a lesser extent, web) for many years, we have not updated the interfaces, nor made them cross platform yet. So this push will be to define a solid cross-platform input method extension framework, and update existing IMX keyboards in our catalogue to work with this new framework.