Keyman Update for 12 September 2025

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the period from 01 September 2025 — 12 September 2025.

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!

Control keys and Control characters for Keyboard Authors

With cursor and line break issues related to Keyman, this document provides the background to how the keys and characters are interpreted and a general knowledge to handle control keys and control characters in the most compatible way.

Keyman minor releases

Keyman 19.0.110-alpha through 19.0.120-alpha were released in this cycle. Significant updates in these versions include:

• Keyman for Android
  • Clean up list layout for edge-to-edge display on Android (#14655)
• Keyman for Linux
  • Prevent crash when keyboard has invalid language data (#14760)
  • Prevent crash when keyboard data is missing from keyboards section (#14708)
• Keyman Developer
  • Restrict invalid characters in identifiers (#14746)
  • Correct error line numbers in Keyman Developer compiler output (#14651)
  • Add clear messages about validation failures to New Project, New LDML Project and New LM Project Parameters form (#14657, #14658, #14659)
  • Transform slashes to backslashes in Package Editor’s path (#14721)
• Documents
  • Update empty “What’s New” page for KeymanWeb (#14660)
  • Update the term “Keyman Desktop” to “Keyman for Windows” (#14669)

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

Keyboard updates

New keyboards

• The Lao Pali Extended keyboard uses the official Lao standard layout, adapted to support entry of the Lao Pali and Lao Sanskrit characters included in Unicode (#3701, #3702).
• The shanghai jamo keyboard is for Wu Jamo Script and Shanghainese, Soochow, and Liampo Jamo orthography ᅌᅮᅌᅧ〯ᅐᅧᆼ〮ᅙᅵᆷ 로 쌍해〮안ᄋᆞ 수쥬안ᄋᆞ 녕버안ᄋᆞ 증〮ᅙᅧᆼᄫᅡᆼᅙᅥᆫ〮 吳語正音咾上海閒話蘇州閒話寧波閒話正音方案 (#3708). Best effort to Cathaylaboratory. 
• The Pre-Vedic Sanskrit Devanagari Phonetic (OPTITRANS) keyboard is Sanskrit devanAgarI input method by a modified version of OPTITRANS and Harvard-Kyoto transliteration systems with added support for reconstructed vedic pronunciation ai=ए, Ai=ऐ, au=ओ, Au=औ and more (#3705). Credit goes to vvasuki.

Enhanced keyboards

• Thanks to dyacob for the GFF Amharic Classic keyboard v3.0 features (#3691, #3712):
  • Re-based version of gff_amharic.
  • Flicks, multitaps, popups, layers, css.
  • Even more strictly adherent to the QWERTY layout.
  • Synced with the current iPhone 4-row keyboard.
• The Beria Erfe Phonetic keyboard v1.2 introduces constrain combining marks to only occur with vowels (#3709).

Predictive text updates

New predictive text

• A Wordlist-based lexical model for Manga (with Latin script) (#329).

Enhanced predictive text

• The GFF Amharic word prediction v1.1.1 demote ነዉ frequency which was artificially high due to a common typographical error (#328). Applaud for dyacob.

Keyboard App Builder updates

Keyboard App Builder 13.1 was released on 2 September 2025.

Please see the Release Notes for more details.