/openboard

My personal fork of the active OpenBoard fork for Android to make changes as I like

Primary LanguageJavaGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

OpenBoard upgrade, WIP

This is an attempt to integrate changes / improvements into OpenBoard that have been sitting around for a long time due to low dev activity. Might end up on F-Droid...

This is mostly a development version. On updates there may be changes that reset some settings. Consider all releases as beta quality at best.

The rough plan for this project:

  • Theming
    • improve user-defined coloring
    • add pre-defined themes
    • make automatic theme switch work with the new themes
  • Multilingual Typing
    • fix some bugs preventing proper usage in some cases (especially concerning key popups)
    • possibly has some undiscovered bugs, more testing required
  • Dictionaries
  • Language settings
    • currently they are scattered across mulitple places (languages, custom input styles, multilingual typing, dictionaries)
  • Clean up the xml files
    • the current state look rather messy, with many useless / duplicate entries that make changes needlessly tricky
  • Make suggestion removal functionality more discoverable
  • Fix some bugs along the way

Once above is done, we can think about renaming and properly releasing the app. First just in this repository, and later on F-Droid.

Changes to OpenBoard:

Further plan / to do:

OpenBoard

100% FOSS keyboard, based on AOSP.

GitHub Workflow Status Translation status Matrix

GitHub release (latest by date) F-Droid Version Google Play Version GitHub Release Date GitHub commits since latest release (by date)

Get it on F-Droid Get it on Google Play

Table of content

Community

Join our [matrix] channel here.

Matrix QR Code

Contribution ❤

Issue reporting

Whether you encountered a bug, or want to see a new feature in OpenBoard, you can contribute to the project by opening a new issue here. Your help is always welcomed !

Before opening a new issue, be sure to check the following :

  • Does the issue already exist ? Make sure a similar issue has not been reported by browsing existing issues.
  • Is the issue still relevant ? Make sure your issue is not already fixed in the latest version of OpenBoard.
  • Did you use the issue template ? It is important to make life of our kind contributors easier by avoiding issues that miss key informations to their resolution.

Please avoid opening issues to ask for a release date, for PR reviews/merges, for more activity on the project, or worth for more contributors. If you have any interrogations on these topics, read this comment from issue #619.

Translation

You can help in translating OpenBoard in your language through our Weblate project.

Translation status

Dictionary creation

To create or update a dictionary for your language, you can use this tool. You will need a wordlist, as described here. The output .dict file must be put in res/raw, and its wordlist in dictionaries.

For your dictionary to be merged into OpenBoard, you must provide the wordlist you used, as well as its license if any.

Code contribution

Getting started

OpenBoard project is based on Gradle and Android Gradle Plugin. To get started, you'll just need to install Android Studio, and import project 'from Version Control / Git / Github' by providing this git repository URL (or git SSH URL).

Once everything got setted up correctly, you're ready to go !

Guidelines

OpenBoard is a complex application, when contributing, you must take a step back and make sure your contribution :

  • Uses already in-place mechanism and take advantage of them. In other terms, does not reinvent the wheel or uses shortcuts that could alter the consistency of the existing code.
  • Has the lowest footprint possible. OpenBoard code has been written by android experts (AOSP/Google engineers). It has been tested and runned on millions of devices. Thus, existing code will always be safer than new code. The less we alter existing code, the more OpenBoard will stay stable. Especially in the input logic scope.
  • Does not bring any non-free code or proprietary binary blobs. This also applies to code/binaries with unknown licenses. Make sure you do not introduce any closed-source library from Google.
  • Complies with the user privacy principle OpenBoard follows.

In addition to previous elements, OpenBoard must stick to F-Droid inclusion guidelines.

Current TODO list

In no particular order, here is the non-exhaustive list of known wanted features :

  • Updated emoji support
  • MaterialYou (M3) support
  • One-handed mode feature
  • Android autofill support
  • Clipboard history feature
  • Text navigation/selection panel
  • Multi-locale typing
  • Emoji search
  • Emoji variant saving
  • Glide typing

Tooling

Edit keyboards content

Keyboards content is often a complex concatenation of data from global to specific locales. For example, additional keys of a given key, also known as 'more keys' in code, are determined by concatenating infos from : common additional keys for a layout (eg. numbers), global locale (eg. common symbols) and specific locale (eg. accents or specific letters).

To edit these infos, you'll need to generate the KeyboardTextsTable.java file. To do so :

  1. Make your modifications in tools/make-keyboard-text/src/main/resources/values-YOUR LOCALE.
  2. Generate the new version of KeyboardTextsTable.java by running Gradle task 'makeText' : 
    ./gradlew tools:make-keyboard-text:makeText

Update emojis

See make-emoji-keys tool README.

License

OpenBoard project is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0.

Permissions of this strong copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights.

See repo's LICENSE file.

Credits