I have been wanting to show how Caribou can be used with the Text Predictor Input Mode I wrote a while ago and finally today I took the time to do it.
Caribou with Text Predictor Input Mode from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.
Okay, the shortcutsย to accept prediction candidates or scroll through them can be changed into some that are quickly accessible.
With the changes I did to Caribou, one can even easily provide a special button, such as “ACCEPT”, like the screenshot below shows:
The changes I’m talking about and that you see in the video and the QWERTY keyboard layout I used can be found in Caribou’s bug #613229.
I wrote these changes because the current way of writing layouts for Caribou doesn’t seem very flexible nor appropriate for non programmers, in my opinion.
These changes drop the current usage of Python files with tuples as a way to configure Caribou’s layouts. Instead, json files should be used and more functionality that wasn’t implemented before is also possible with the mentioned patch.
Basically, instead of having either character keys or symbol, label pairs that Caribou understands, each key should be a set of attributes that define it, which Caribou then interprets accordingly.
For a basic key, all one needs to have is the value attribute, which can receive a string (for example a character) or the name of a key in GDK (you can easily figure them out from the GDK key syms file).
So:
{“value”: “a”} will create a key labeled a that inputs the character a
{“value”: “BackSpace”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “BackSpace”
You can override the label of a key using the attribute “label”, as:
{“value”: “BackSpace”,
“label”: “โซ”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “โซ”
Labels can use Pango Markup to change its text style, for example: {“label”: “<small><b>Small Bold Text Key</b></small>”, …}
A width attribute is also introduced and means the width relative to a usual key’s width. A width of 3 will generate a key that fills the space of 3 keys whereas 0.25 fills a quarter of a regular key’s space.
A key can be of a given type which indicates how it behaviors. There is 5 types of keys: normal, layout_switcher, preferences, mask and dummy.
A normal key type indicates it is a regular “you-press-you-input” key and is the default type, which is why it wasn’t specified in the examples above.
A layout_switcher key, when pressed, will change the keyboard sublayout to the one given by the value attribute (and must exist in the layout file), so, if we are in the “lowercase” layout and we want a key labeled “UP” to change to the “uppercase” layout:
{“label”: “UP”, “key_type”: “layout_switcher”, “value”: “uppercase”}
The preferences key type brings up the preferences menu.
A mask key means that you set a mask indicated by the value attribute when you press it. For the Alt key:
{“label”: “Alt”, “key_type”: “mask”, “value”: “mod1”} again, the “mod1” is the mask name from GDK.
Finally, there’s the dummy key type which is used basically to set spacer keys and allow to separate some keys from others in order to improve visual grouping. Rows that don’t have the number of keys in any row (including dummy keys) will be centered horizontally.
These let you play with keyboards’ layouts and design any kind of layout in a flexible and easy way.
At the moment, the patch is still pending review. Let’s hope it gets a green light and is applied.
