kazuar

kazuar is a 100% FOSS keyboard, forked from KeyMapperOpenBoard (which is built upon OpenBoard and the AOSP keyboard).

Note

A cassowary (kazuar) is a large flightless bird native to the tropical forests of New Guinea and nearby islands.

This project is optimized and designed to support only Russian and English languages. All other languages and layout assets have been removed, which successfully reduced the application's size by 5 times.

Why

This project was born out of a long search for a keyboard application that allowed comprehensive layout customization. Existing options on the market were too limited for these specific requirements:

• Consistent Key Positioning: A keyboard layout where keys do not shift or change size when toggling between languages (maintaining large, easy-to-click buttons).
• No Crowded Symbol Layers: Finding basic punctuation like a question mark shouldn't require digging through layers of symbol menus. In kazuar, there is no separate symbols layer; symbols are accessed via long-pressing letter keys, or through a dedicated editing/navigation layout.
• Taps Over Swipes: Swipe typing is often a guessing game where a small inaccuracy completely alters the meaning of a word. Traditional tap typing is more reliable; even with occasional typos, the original meaning of the text is preserved.
• Gestures for Actions: While swipe typing is disabled, swipe gestures are used for navigation and quick actions: switching languages, deleting words, moving the cursor, toggling Shift, switching layouts, and pressing Enter. These can be configured in the settings under Advanced -> Setup swipe controls.
• Multi-Tap secondary letters: To keep the keys large without moving them around, some secondary letters are placed behind a double-tap of primary letters, functioning similarly to multi-tap systems on classic physical mobile phones.

Screenshot Previews (V3 Light Theme)

Russian Layout

English Layout

more pics: here

Documentation

For instructions on customizing and configuring the keyboard, please refer to the documentation files in the docs directory:

• Custom Layout XML Format (Русский) — How to define and load custom keyboard layouts.
• Custom Theme JSON Format — How to load and customize theme colors.
• Layout Reference — Reference documentation on the default layout versions (V1, V2, V3) and edit mode.
• Default Layout Sources — Built-in XML layout definitions in the source tree (templates for custom layouts).
• Color Palette Reference — Reference for theme colors (e.g., Gruvbox palette).
• Icon Reference — List of unicode characters used for functional keys.
• Settings Menu Outline — Overview of available menu options and settings.

Versioning

This project uses Calendar Versioning (CalVer) with the format YY.MM.DD (e.g., 26.08.10 for releases created on August 10, 2026).

Acknowledgements

• Icons & Visuals: We would like to express our gratitude to the talented artists who designed the application icons:

  • aroum
  • vrifmus
  • PavelAltynnikov Detailed credits, authorship info, and preview images can be found in the Icon README.

• Russian Language Corpora & Predictive N-grams: The Russian predictive dictionary and conversational n-gram model were curated and derived with reference to open-source linguistic corpora:

  • Taiga Corpus (Tatiana Shavrina et al., CC BY 4.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0)
  • Omnia Russica open-source Russian corpus initiative
  • OPUS OpenSubtitles conversational dialogue corpus