SimpleKeyboard

The idea of this package came from a keyboard extension and the fact that - AFAIK - one can't open another keyboard within a keyboard extension. So the goal was to have a ViewController, that simply displays the keyboard and changes a text variable.

UI Themes

As the goal of this idea was to simply imitate the system keyboard that's a lot where the inspiration came from. However, inspired by a Tweet from @laurentdelrey I decided to also include a floating keyboard with some nice rounded corners.

SimpleStandardKeyboard Screenshots

System (in light)	Floating (in dark)

Components

This project includes a SimpleKeyboard that takes a custom 2D-list of Strings which will be rendered as the keys. The SimpleStandardKeyboard provides a default implementation for some languages and a few more default settings.

Usage

Depending on the needs one can use the keyboards in a larger SwiftUI environment with a Text that will act as the TextField. Or one can choose to only display the keyboard with a the text input coming from a UIKit environment. To eventually get a UIViewController one has to use a UIHostingController. To manage the transition with all the Bindings, one can use the KeyboardSettings.

Use SimpleKeyboard with UIKit

Here is an example implementation from one of my projects:

class MyViewController: UIViewController {
    @IBOutlet var textField: UITextField!
    
    //..........
    
    func presentKeyboard() {
        let keyboardSettings = KeyboardSettings(language: .english, textInput: self.textField)
        let keyboardVC = MyKeyboardMaker(settings: keyboardSettings).makeViewController()
        self.contentController.pushViewController(keyboardVC, animated: true)
    }
}

struct MyKeyboardMaker {
    
    @ObservedObject var settings: KeyboardSettings
    
    func makeViewController() -> UIHostingController<SimpleStandardKeyboard> {
        UIHostingController(rootView: SimpleStandardKeyboard(settings: $settings)
    }
}

When initializing a new object of that struct, one has to pass the language and textField. Now makeViewController() can be called e.g. pushed onto a NavigationController.