KeyboardKit

The easiest way to add comprehensive hardware keyboard control to an iPad, iPhone, or Mac Catalyst app.

Keyboard control is a standard expectation of Mac apps. It’s important on iOS too because a hardware keyboard improves speed and ergonomics, which makes an iPad an even more powerful productivity machine.

KeyboardKit is designed to integrate with the UIKit focus system when available, and it provides similar arrow and tab key navigation on OS versions where the focus system is not available.

Features

• Keyboard navigation without the focus system (navigate with arrow keys and tab key)
• Additional navigation commands (dismiss modals, change tabs, go back)
• Collection view and table view commands (reorder, delete, select all)
• Keyboard scrolling and zooming (including page up, page down, home, end — and map views)
• Key equivalents for buttons (SwiftUI buttons, UIKit bar button items)
• Advanced text navigation (find next/previous, define)
• Keyboard window management (open, close, cycle)
• Keyboard date picker (change day, week, month or year)
• Main menu and discoverability HUD (group commands under File, Edit, View etc.)
• Discoverability titles in 39 localisations

Requirements

Xcode 14.1 or later is required. KeyboardKit supports iOS 13 onwards on iPad, iPhone and Mac Catalyst (both scaled and optimised). tvOS is not supported.

Both Swift and Objective-C apps are supported. Since KeyboardKit is implemented in Swift, it’s not possible subclass KeyboardKit classes from Objective-C. However all other features of KeyboardKit are available to Objective-C apps.

Installation

Swift Package Manager

Add KeyboardKit to an existing Xcode project as a package dependency:

1. From the File menu, select Swift Packages › Add Package Dependency…
2. Enter "https://github.com/douglashill/KeyboardKit" into the package repository URL text field.

Direct

1. Clone this repository.
2. Drag KeyboardKit.xcodeproj into your Xcode project.
3. Add the KeyboardKit target as a dependency of your target.
4. Add KeyboardKit.framework as an embedded framework.

Swift Package Manager requires the Swift and Objective-C sources to be separated into modules. The KeyboardKitObjC module is used internally by KeyboardKit and does not need to be imported explicitly by your app.

CocoaPods

KeyboardKit is available on CocoaPods as Keyboard-Kit.

Please open a pull request if you notice any integration problems.

Usage

Import the framework:

import KeyboardKit

UIKit

Instead of creating or subclassing a UIKit class directly, use the subclasses from KeyboardKit instead. All KeyboardKit subclasses are named by changing UI to Keyboard. For example replace

class SettingsViewController: UICollectionViewController {
    ...
}

with

class SettingsViewController: KeyboardCollectionViewController {
    ...
}

Or create KeyboardKit subclasses directly:

let tabBarController = KeyboardTabBarController()
tabBarController.viewControllers = [
    KeyboardNavigationController(rootViewController: SettingsViewController()),
]

In order to receive key commands, an object must be on the responder chain.

You can see more in the KeyboardKitDemo app, and each class includes API documentation in their Swift source file.

SwiftUI

When using the .keyboardShortcut modifier on a Button, access semantically defined KeyboardShortcuts for common actions within the .KeyboardKit namespace:

Button("Save") {
    // Save something here in the button action
}
.keyboardShortcut(.KeyboardKit.save)

This adds the ability trigger the action of the button by pressing ⌘S.

Customisation

The public API is currently kept minimal so components are easy to drop in. If there is something you’d like to be able to customise in KeyboardKit, please open an issue to discuss. You could also consider directly integrating the source code and modify it as needed.

Learn more

• Conference talk: Keyboard control in UIKit apps at iOS Conf SG 2020
• Podcast discussion: iPhreaks episode 297
• Blog post: What’s New in KeyboardKit for iOS 14?
• Change log

Credits

KeyboardKit is a project from Douglas Hill with the kind help of contributors. Some concepts were originally developed for PSPDFKit and reimplemented in Swift for KeyboardKit. I use KeyboardKit in my reading app.

Contributing

I’d love to have help on this project. For small changes please open a pull request, for larger changes please open an issue first to discuss what you’d like to see.

Tests are not required for new functionality, but fixed regressions should have automated tests. Use KeyboardKitTests for unit tests that don’t need views or a responder chain. Use KeyboardKitDemoUITests for integration tests that can be reproduced in the demo app. This only works on Mac Catalyst currently because iOS does not allow simulating hardware keyboard input. Use KeyboardKitUITests for any test cases between, which is probably most cases.

Licence

MIT license — see License.txt