Starting out/beginner advice

[mcgridles]

I recently came across KeyboardKit repo and I had a quick question regarding building the keyboards.

Basically, I want to make a keyboard that just changes the label and output of the spacebar but the main problem is I don’t have a ton of experience with Swift. I’ve followed all of your instructions for installation and everything seems to be okay, but in your examples you have files such as AlphabeticKeyboard.swift and DemoKeyboard.swift, but I’m not quite sure where these files would go in my Xcode project. I currently have a blank project with a custom keyboard extension and a default KeyboardViewController.swift file.

I know it’s not your job to teach me Swift or anything but I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction. If I could get one of your example keyboards running then I could start to play around with it myself and figure it out but getting off the ground has proved tricky.

Any information you can give will be greatly appreciated.

[danielsaidi]

Hi @mcgridles - I'd be happy to help you get started!

Basically, the code for the demo keyboards you mentioned can be placed anywhere, either in your hosting app or in your keyboard extension target. However, if you only intend to use a keyboard model in your extension, you only have to add it there. If you however want to use a keyboard model in both the hosting app and in the extension (I do so in some of my apps), you can place the code file in the hosting app and make sure to also add it to the keyboard extension under "targets". You could also create a separate framework and import it into both targets.

You can easily try out the demo keyboards by cloning the repository and open and run project in Xcode. You can deploy the app either to a real device or simulator. This will also install the custom keyboard, which you then can enable in System Settings, under Keyboards. You can then switch to this keyboard as soon as you start typing into any text field.

However, before you begin working on your keyboard, please be aware that KeyboardKit lacks a bunch of features that the native keyboard is currently providing, such as adaptive virtual button sizes, swipe to type etc. In other words, KeyboardKit makes it easy to build custom keyboards, but it can not replicate the full power of the native keyboards.

Best of luck

Daniel

[danielsaidi]

Closing this since I haven't heard back. Good luck!