CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Thumb-Key

• Ways to contribute
• How do I add my language or layout?
• Theming guide
• Application structure
• Code contributions
  • Kotlin
  • Code quality
• Adding translations

Ways to contribute

• Add a new keyboard layout.
• Participate here and start answering questions.
• File GitHub issues for bug reports from /c/thumbkey. Watch the project for duplicate reports and link them to the first report so devs can easily close dupes.
• File new bug reports for issues you find.
• Add missing translations.
• Code contributions.

How do I add my language or layout?

I'd be happy to accept additions to add more languages, and layouts. To start:

• Read the letter position guidelines above. This means you'll likely need a letter frequency chart for text written in your language.
  • The general rule is: popular vowels on the right, bottom to top, consonants on the left.
• Copy this file, or another sample keyboard from the same folder.
  • The title of the new layout should be lowercase and follow the following format: [languages] [base] [qualifiers]? [version]? (see also #702).
  • Change the characters to whatever you'd like.
  • This file contains both a shifted, and non-shifted keyboard, so make sure you take care of both.
  • You can also add or subtract columns if you want, but the layout must remain a grid. I highly recommend sticking with the 3x3 layout.
• Add the new keyboard to the end of KeyboardLayout.kt file. If you don't know how to do this, skip to the next step.
• Either open a pull request, or an issue, linking your new keyboard file. I'll handle the rest of the work.
• If opening a pull request, run ./gradlew formatKotlin to format the code correctly.

Theming guide

To add a custom theme:

• Use google's Material 3 custom theme generator, and save your Theme.kt file.
• Copy the theme into Color.kt like the others.
• Add the theme to the ThemeColor enum in Types.kt
• Add a translation string in strings.xml for your theme name.
• Add the theme to the colorPairs in Theme.kt

If you want to tweak your theme more precisely, these are the colours that are used. Please keep the theme in line with Material Design Guidelines where feasibe.

Coloured element	Material colour used
Normal key background	surface
Special key (space, emoji etc) background	surfaceVariant
Main key colour	primary
Key animated after press	tertiary
Swipe letter colour	secondary
Swipe symbol colour	secondary, but at 50% alpha
Keypress flash colour on tap/hold	inversePrimary
Keypress flash colour on release	tertiaryContainer
Key outline	outline
Backdrop	background

Application structure

• Basic Modern Android Development tech stack (Compose, Navigation, Coroutines, AndroidX)
• Guide to App Architecture, without domain layer. Basically, MVVM + Repositories for data access.

Code contributions

You can open Thumb-Key in AndroidStudio, version 2022.3.1 or later (Giraffe).

Use Java 11+, preferably Java 17

Kotlin

This project is full Kotlin. Please do not write Java classes.

Code quality

The code must be formatted to a common standard.

To check for violations

./gradlew lintKotlin

Or just run this to fix them

./gradlew formatKotlin

Markdown and yaml files are formatted according to prettier.

You can install prettier either through the plugin, or globally using npm npm install -g prettier

To check for violations

prettier -c "*.md" "*.yml"

To fix the violations

prettier --write "*.md" "*.yml"

Adding translations

You can find the translations in the app/src/main/res/values-{locale}/strings.xml file. You can open it in android studio, right click and click open translations editor or you can directly edit the files.

If you add a new locale. Also add it in locales_config.xml. Don't forget to escape ' in translations.