An attempt to create simpler keyboards for Devanagari and possibly other Indian scripts in an effort to increase digital literacy among non-English speaking Indians. At the moment this project contains two keyboards:
- Barakhana (बारहखाना, lit. 12 boxes/keys, name subject to change) - A mobile keyboard layout based upon the Devanagari varnamala's (alphabet) clustering of syllables. Intended to be usable by anyone who knows the varnamala.
barahkhana_demo.mp4
- A smarter desktop keyboard layout based on the ITRANS scheme (name undecided), but has more "smart" features inspired by other typing systems such as Vietnamese TELEX and Korean Dubeolsik. It also intends to reduce the number of characters mapped to only the ones used in most daily communication.
As of now, only Barakhana is at a usable level of completeness, though the rules used in the making of it were largely copied over from the ITRANS variant.
The overall project is named "Saral" (सरल) which means "simple" in Hindi, in reference to the goal of creating simpler and easy-to-use keyboard layouts for Indian scripts.
Barakhana depends upon flick and multitap functionality which is only availble in Keyman 17.0 and above, which is not yet a stable release as of this writing (check if it is on https://status.keyman.com/).
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To download and use the keyboard as of now, you will need to use a pre-release version of Keyman, which can be found at https://keyman.com/downloads/pre-release.
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Then, download the
.kmpfile from the releases page. -
Follow the instructions for iOS or Android to set up the keyboard on your mobile device.
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You should be good to go!
I will eventually submit the keyboard to the Keyman Cloud Keyboard Repository, which will make it available for download from the Keyman app itself. (maybe even a stabdalone Android/iOS app once SIL's Keyboard App Builder is updated to support KM17 :) )
See LICENSE.md
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- Web
- iPhone
- Android phone
- Mobile devices
- Desktop devices
- Tablet devices