🎉 Announcing the release of Keyman 17

Keyman 17.0 is now available to download!

We are excited to introduce the following new features:

• Support for the new LDML Keyboard Standard on desktop computers and laptops.
• Improving gesture support on touch layouts. This includes introducing new gestures such as flicks, and multitap, and improving the usability of existing gestures, such as holding a modifier key while tapping on another key.
• Enhancements to the predictive text suggestion banner, showing more suggestions and handling longer words better.
• In Keyman Developer, an all new keyboard compiler that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Alongside the new features, there have been many less visible improvements:

• Keyboarding on macOS is now much more reliable with the introduction of Keyman Core into Keyman for macOS.
• Diacritics and other marks can now be more consistently and clearly displayed on the On Screen Keyboard.
• Keyman for Linux now works with Wayland.

Using Gestures on the Touch Layout Keys

There are now several gestures available to interact with some keys on the keyboard. Keys which have gestures available will normally show a hint in the top right of the key:

• Long press: Press and hold a key, and after a moment a submenu will appear. Slide the finger to the submenu to select a key. Release the finger, and the highlighted key from the submenu will be output.
• Flick: Press and hold a key, and then slide the finger in various directions on a key to reach alternate outputs. The key will animate to show the expected output when the finger is released. A common flick is to slide down to reach numerals on the top row of the keyboard.
• Multitap: Some keys can be pressed repeatedly and rapidly to reach alternate outputs. Tapping rapidly twice on Shift will activate Caps Lock on many keyboards.

Improved Suggestion Banner

• Drag the banner horizontally to see more suggestions
• Overly-long suggestions are partially hidden, but expand when a finger is held on them
• Displays up to 8 suggestions

Creating LDML Keyboards with Keyman Developer

• New project wizard for creating LDML keyboards
• Integrated LDML keyboard test window

New Keyman Developer compiler toolchain

• The Windows-only kmcomp.exe command-line compiler has been replaced with a cross-platform kmc tool, with more consistent parameters. kmc is also up to 100x faster than kmcomp.exe when batch building keyboards.

The full change log is available here.

Download 17.0 from keyman.com

Learn more on the Keyman blog

3 posts - 1 participant

Read full topic