Is it possible in Keyman to have a key that inserts both left and right brackets and place cursor between them? I see this key on some keyboards and I will like to have it on our keyboard.
Here is a link that explains it for Windows.
http://xahlee.info/kbd/best_way_to_insert_brackets.html
This isn’t currently on our roadmap.
There are significant differences on how cursor positioning is implemented across platforms and there isn’t a good safe way to do this kind of thing consistently at present. Also, while we could probably get something working for parentheses and similar punctuation, cursor positioning gets very murky very quickly once we start talking about complex scripts – we don’t want features which only work with a limited subset of characters as far as we can avoid them.
Ok. I’m beginning to think that at some point, maybe in future, the Keyman app will begin to have features that are specific to some script and not others, while still maintaining the cross-platform ability. Or, maybe it already has some.
Do you mind sending me a link to any guide on how to implement this on mobile for Latin scripts? I will like to try it out on a custom keyboard built with Android Studio or Eclipse.
Thanks.
This feature you are requesting is a very specific use case that just doesn’t fit into the Keyman roadmap. It would take a huge effort to implement and in my opinion would never be able to escape significant compatibility issues. Years ago, Keyman Desktop on Windows supported virtual key output (which is needed for this feature) but we deprecated it because it was just impossible to make it work consistently across all apps. Some things have improved in this area, but others have gotten worse: the landscape has become more complex, not less.
You are welcome to fork the Keyman repo and add support yourself. If you got the functionality working reliably across all platforms, we’d probably accept a pull request. But we’re not going to try and do it ourselves at this time – remember that the Keyman team is a small team with limited resources, and we have many, many other more urgent issues on our roadmap – including things that you have requested!
In terms of links to guides: there are plenty of guides online on how to build a keyboard app using Android Studio – just Google for them!
This is generally not something that would be designed into a keyboard layout or input framework, normally this type of functionality is either built into an application or uses a macro recorder/player with compatible applications.
Noted. That answers it all. Thanks.