Hi Light team!
Request for Swedish qwerty keyboard layout
I would love to see a Swedish qwerty layout on the LP3, it is the standard Swedish layout, identical across every major keyboard.
It is painful to input Swedish with the Swedish characters åäö/ÅÄÖ hidden behind the long press.
It's been a major hurdle for me and I've seen it discussed by other Swedish speaking users on Reddit and Discord. One user describes it as adding minutes to writing a message. I can certainly feel that myself, it makes me pick up my second device instead (old iphone) for any response of substance.
Examples
Here are examples based on the standard layout across iOS and Android as they could look in LP3.
The changes are the addition of "å" at the end of the first line and "öä" at the end of the second line.
Lowercase:
Shifted
Implementation
I'm working on the implementation. The shots above are made via the Paparazzi Android testing library against the work in progress. In the comment below are also shots from LightOS Emulator. I can open a pr if you want.
It follows the existing EnQwerty.kt pattern and adds no public API changes, just a new layout registered in LayoutRegistryItem like the merged Colemak layout.
Caveats
One issue with Swedish Qwerty is that adding more letters onto the keyboard decreases key cap size and increases risk of jabbing the wrong key. Default Android and iOS solutions have the same issue.
Fitting 11 keys per row shrinks them to ~32dp — the same width iOS and Gboard already use for their Swedish layouts, so it's a well-precedented tradeoff. Any other solution would create friction with muscle memory for users.
Transparency
I'm a web engineer so here I am leaning on Fable to grapple with Android and Kotlin which I don't usually work with. I'm running the same code quality checks that I do for my other work with manual code reviews as well as adversarial reviews from CodeRabbit and Codex, code reuse and simplification checks, research on best practices for iOS and Android as well as Light team coding habits. The implementation runs well with stock android emulator as well as LightOS Emulator. I want this to land well and am prepared to do the legwork.
A Nordic Aside
This would also be a first step to adding the other Nordic layouts. Finnish has the exact same layout, Norwegian and Danish just flips two characters. There is community interest in these but I'd try to reach out to those users for feedback and further context.
| Language |
Second last key |
Last key |
| Swedish+Finnish |
ö |
ä |
| Danish |
æ |
ø |
| Norwegian |
ø |
æ |
All four share å on the first row, these are the last two keys of the second row.
Icelandic and Sámi are out of scope.
Larger context
The best workaround at the moment is switching to the QWERTZ layout that has ö and ä keys, only hiding å behind longpress. Disabling English dictation and spelling also helps.
I've looked at the previous merged pr for colemak to understand a positive request for a similar addition.
I'm also looking into Swedish spelling and dictation, as well as an implementation for auto correct (that could also work for English). They are out of scope for this request.
Hi Light team!
Request for Swedish qwerty keyboard layout
I would love to see a Swedish qwerty layout on the LP3, it is the standard Swedish layout, identical across every major keyboard.
It is painful to input Swedish with the Swedish characters åäö/ÅÄÖ hidden behind the long press.
It's been a major hurdle for me and I've seen it discussed by other Swedish speaking users on Reddit and Discord. One user describes it as adding minutes to writing a message. I can certainly feel that myself, it makes me pick up my second device instead (old iphone) for any response of substance.
Examples
Here are examples based on the standard layout across iOS and Android as they could look in LP3.
The changes are the addition of "å" at the end of the first line and "öä" at the end of the second line.
Lowercase:
Shifted
Implementation
I'm working on the implementation. The shots above are made via the Paparazzi Android testing library against the work in progress. In the comment below are also shots from LightOS Emulator. I can open a pr if you want.
It follows the existing EnQwerty.kt pattern and adds no public API changes, just a new layout registered in LayoutRegistryItem like the merged Colemak layout.
Caveats
One issue with Swedish Qwerty is that adding more letters onto the keyboard decreases key cap size and increases risk of jabbing the wrong key. Default Android and iOS solutions have the same issue.
Fitting 11 keys per row shrinks them to ~32dp — the same width iOS and Gboard already use for their Swedish layouts, so it's a well-precedented tradeoff. Any other solution would create friction with muscle memory for users.
Transparency
I'm a web engineer so here I am leaning on Fable to grapple with Android and Kotlin which I don't usually work with. I'm running the same code quality checks that I do for my other work with manual code reviews as well as adversarial reviews from CodeRabbit and Codex, code reuse and simplification checks, research on best practices for iOS and Android as well as Light team coding habits. The implementation runs well with stock android emulator as well as LightOS Emulator. I want this to land well and am prepared to do the legwork.
A Nordic Aside
This would also be a first step to adding the other Nordic layouts. Finnish has the exact same layout, Norwegian and Danish just flips two characters. There is community interest in these but I'd try to reach out to those users for feedback and further context.
All four share å on the first row, these are the last two keys of the second row.
Icelandic and Sámi are out of scope.
Larger context
The best workaround at the moment is switching to the QWERTZ layout that has ö and ä keys, only hiding å behind longpress. Disabling English dictation and spelling also helps.
I've looked at the previous merged pr for colemak to understand a positive request for a similar addition.
I'm also looking into Swedish spelling and dictation, as well as an implementation for auto correct (that could also work for English). They are out of scope for this request.