Keyman 19 roadmap update

Last week, we held an online team review of the status of the Keyman 19 release. As we wrote in our previous roadmap blog post, we have had significant resource shortfalls in the last year — the team has shrunk from 14 to 9 people. We are seeing the fallout from this in all areas in the Keyman project.

At the review meeting, we found we still had 363 open issues assigned for resolution in version 19. This is clearly far too big a list for the current team. We also assessed the major “epic” projects that we were aiming to complete in the Keyman 19 project plan, and determined which epics we would need to postpone. We have listed the epics from that roadmap post below, along with the actions we are taking for each, in order to release version 19 in the 2026 calendar year:

CLDR/LDML keyboards

• web-core ⌛ This epic provides support for CLDR keyboards on mobile. This will not land in version 19; we still have significant work to complete on this.

Desktop products

• arm-windows ✅ Support for ARM processors on Windows is complete and robust, already available in Keyman 19 alpha releases
• mac-config-app ✅ We aim to release the completely redesigned Mac installer and configuration app in version 19.
• mcompile-linux ❓ We hope to release support for mnemonic keyboard layouts in Linux in version 19, but we will not delay the release if we encounter difficulties.

Predictive text

• autocorrect ✅ We will split multi-token corrections into a separate epic, but will plan to release single-token automatic corrections in version 19.

Internationalization and Localization

• website-i18n ✅ Internationalization of key pages on keyman.com is already online, and last touches of integration with apps should arrive in version 19. We are seeking translators!

Keyboard authoring

• embed-osk-in-kmx ⌛ While the basic file format changes and compiler toolchain are complete, the integration into the mobile products is still underway (linked to web-core); this will not land in version 19.
• kmc-convert ✅ The first converter, from .keylayout to .kmn, will be included in version 19.

Websites

• keymanweb.com ❓ This is a rewrite of the user interface for our online web keyboard. It may be completed in the 19.0 cycle but can be released later so we will not delay the release for it.

Outstanding issues and bug reports

Following the review meeting, we sat down and worked through the 363 open issues, reassessing their status and importance for version 19. The following outcomes were reached:

• We closed 18 issues as either fixed or no longer relevant
• We moved 198 issues to version 20.0 — pending reassessment when we start work on 20.0
• We moved 19 low-priority issues to a future release
• We reorganized the remaining 153 issues into sprints for resolution in the next 16 weeks

The astute among you will realize that that adds up to 388 issues, significantly more than the 363 issues we started with — that’s because as we worked through this list, an additional 25 issues were reported!

Thank you for your support and engagement with Keyman! We will continue to strive to produce a program that you can depend on, and our priority is to do our best to ensure that Keyman works smoothly for you to type in your language, all the time.