Custom layouts & the layout editor
Edit any keyboard layout visually, or as raw JSON, and share the result.
A layout is the key grid itself: which key sits where, what it types, what its long-press alternates are. WM Keyboard ships 372 of them, and every one is editable: rearrange a few keys, add a Ctrl key for a terminal app, or build a language layout from scratch, then share the result as a file.
Editing a layout
Section titled “Editing a layout”Layouts of your own are always listed, on or off; shipped ones appear once you’ve turned them on under Languages. There’s no edit button: tap the row itself and the visual editor opens, a grid that renders with your actual theme, key shape, and font, so what you edit is what you’ll type on. The three icon buttons at the end of a row do something else, and in this order: export the layout to a file, duplicate it, and delete it (or, on a shipped layout you’ve edited, reset it).
A layout has up to nine layers (Letters, Symbols, Symbols 2, Number, Phone, Date, Time, Date & time, and Fn), switchable with tabs across the top. None of them has to be defined: any layer you leave untouched falls back to the built-in grid for that layer (the shipped QWERTY’s), so a layout that only rearranges letters still gets a working number pad and symbol page without you drawing three hundred keys yourself. Letters gets one extra guarantee the others don’t, though. See Details & edge cases. A pencil icon on a tab marks a layer this layout has authored its own copy of; an unauthored tab shows the built-in grid live, with a note that editing it will fork a copy just for this layout.
A “Show the shift plane” toggle redraws every key with its shiftLabel (or an uppercased label) instead of the primary one, so you can check the shifted layer without switching layers.
Keys set to “switch layout” or “emoji panel” draw an icon in the grid rather than the label stored on them. The globe key is the one you’ll meet: its stored label is the emoji 🌐, but the keyboard has always drawn its own monochrome globe icon there instead, and now the editor does too, so the grid matches what you actually type on. Change the key’s action and it goes back to drawing its label.
Editing a key
Section titled “Editing a key”Tap any key to open its edit sheet:
- Label: what’s drawn on the key.
- Output: what it actually types; leave it blank and it types the label.
- Shift label: leave it blank and Shift just uppercases the label.
- Action: opens a picker with 26 options across six groups: typing (types text, Shift, caps lock, Delete, forward delete, Space, Enter), layers (symbols page, letters page, emoji panel, switch layout, Fn layer), modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Meta; tap to arm, double-tap to lock), keys apps understand (Tab, Esc, arrow keys), chorded input (braille dot, morse dot, morse dash), and a catch-all group for a broadcast-intent key (fires an Android broadcast for automation apps like Tasker) and a “Nothing” key that deliberately swallows taps.
- Width: a slider in quarter-step increments, plus preset chips for 1 / 1.25 / 1.5 / 2 / 4, and a “Fill the row” button.
- On text keys only: Icon and Icon hint (a name from a 46-icon catalog: arrows, editing, keyboard chrome, and so on, plus 24 shorthand aliases like
deleteforbackspaceorglobeforlanguage, matched case-insensitively; an unrecognized name just falls back to drawing the label), Long-press alternates (space-separated, so an alternate can’t itself contain a space; multi-character entries like.comwork fine, and the first one doubles as the small corner hint), and Field adaptation (none, comma slot, or period slot: email and web fields swap those two slots for@and/).
The sheet also has buttons to delete the key, move it left or right, or duplicate it. Two fields exist only in the raw JSON: a clipboard action (select all / copy / paste / cut / undo / redo, fired on long-press instead of the alternates popup) and per-direction flick outputs for a 12-key kana-style pad, because they’re rare enough that a dedicated control would crowd the sheet for everyone else.
Rows and layers
Section titled “Rows and layers”Select a key and a row action bar appears above the grid: add a key to that row, duplicate the row, or delete it (disabled once only one row is left). A red warning line shows if the row’s total width doesn’t match the layer’s overall grid weight. A row height slider (×0.5–×2, quarter steps, with 0.75/1/1.25/1.5/2 presets) adjusts just that row.
Below the grid: “Add a row” appends an empty one, “Reorder rows” opens a drag-reorder dialog, “Reorder keys in row N” appears once a multi-key row is selected, and “Reset this layer” (shown only on an authored layer) drops your changes and falls back to the inherited grid.
Undo and redo hold up to 30 whole-layout snapshots for the session (not saved between visits), and everything you type inside one key’s edit sheet coalesces into a single undo step, so relabeling a key isn’t twenty tiny undos. There’s no save button: every change writes through immediately, and the screen says so (“Saved automatically”).
A “Problems” section at the bottom lists live validation findings as you edit. See Details & edge cases for what gets checked.
Tablet keys
Section titled “Tablet keys”Add tablet keys automatically is a switch for the whole layout, not one layer. On a tablet the keyboard widens every ordinary alphabetic grid by a column each side and fills the space with Tab, backslash, caps lock, a second shift and the rest, described in full under size & position. It’s on for every layout, including yours.
Turn it off for a layout you’ve already laid out wide by hand, or one you want kept exactly as authored. If the switch says the setting has no effect, the widening already declines this layout on its own (it does that for flick pads, braille, morse and any grid with no shift key), and the switch is only there to record your answer in case the layout changes later.
Your phone grid is what the editor shows and what you’re editing; the tablet keys are added on top of it at typing time, so there’s no second grid to keep in step.
Reaching the raw JSON
Section titled “Reaching the raw JSON”“Edit as JSON” at the bottom of the grid editor opens the layout as text, for anything the grid editor has no control for: clipboard actions, flick maps, or just pasting in a grid you built elsewhere.
It’s also the only way to change the layout’s name, its language (langId) or its composer, which is the thing people go looking for right after duplicating something. There’s no rename button on the list screen or in the editor, so a copy stays “Probhat copy” until you edit "name" here. Same for the language: a duplicate inherits the original’s, and langId is what picks the dictionary, autocorrect, script rules, dictation and shift behaviour, so a grid you’ve rearranged into a different language needs it changed by hand.
This screen works differently from the grid editor: it’s a draft with an explicit Apply button, not autosave; half-typed JSON isn’t a valid layout, so there’s nothing sensible to save as you type. The text starts as your layout, JSON-encoded. Applying it parses the text; invalid JSON shows “That is not valid layout JSON.” and stops there. A valid parse always keeps the id you were already editing (pasting a different layout’s id in is deliberately ignored, so you can’t accidentally overwrite a different layout) and runs it through the same repair pass used on import (see below), showing what got fixed. If nothing needed fixing, the screen closes for you; if something did, it stays open so you can see the changes before leaving.
The text field colors keys, strings, numbers, and punctuation by your theme, but it’s a straight recolor with no reformatting: the characters you typed stay exactly where they are.
Layout files and sharing
Section titled “Layout files and sharing”A layout exports as a .wmlayout.json file: the same envelope format every shipped asset layout already uses internally, tagged "format": "wmkeyboard-layout". Export and duplicate buttons sit on every row of the layout gallery, both for your own layouts and the built-in ones.
The exported filename comes from the layout’s name (stripped of anything that isn’t a letter, digit, space, underscore, or hyphen), falling back to “layout” if that leaves nothing. Import accepts .wmlayout.json files through the in-app “Import a layout” row, or by tapping one directly in a file manager or chat app; WM Keyboard registers as a handler for the .wmlayout.json extension. Either path shows the same confirm dialog with the layout’s name, and (this is worth remembering) an imported layout is never switched on automatically. It’s added to your layouts, and you turn it on under Languages when you’re ready.
Import is deliberately permissive about almost everything except one thing: the format tag inside the file. Malformed values, missing fields, an oversized row: all of that gets silently fixed by a repair pass, and the fixes are listed in the confirm dialog so you know what changed. Only a file that isn’t recognizably a WM Keyboard layout at all gets rejected.
Installing community layouts
Section titled “Installing community layouts”Layout is one of the addon types a repository can offer. Installing one works like a manual import (it’s added to your layouts under Languages, not switched on) except the confirm prompt asks “Turn it on so you can type with it?” specifically, since a layout you can’t type with yet isn’t much use installed. Turning it on just adds it to the same enabled-layouts list the Languages screen toggle uses.
Addon-installed layouts don’t show up in the “Your layouts” group on the Key layouts screen; that group is for layouts you built here. An installed layout lives under Languages, and uninstalling it (from the Addons screen) removes it the same way deleting a layout does.
Options
Section titled “Options”This screen has two sections plus two import rows between them. Your layouts lists every layout you’ve made or edited yourself, on or off, since both Duplicate and Import leave their result switched off and hiding it would mean the thing you just made disappearing. Built in lists the shipped layouts you’ve enabled (372 ship in total: 18 compiled built-ins, including QWERTY’s English alternates like Dvorak and Colemak, plus 354 JSON assets covering the long tail of languages and scripts, including regional Latin standards like BÉPO). That’s the one filtered group, so enable a layout for a language first under Languages → Switching and it shows up here to edit.
There’s no default value to quote for “which layouts exist”: a fresh install starts with no custom layouts of your own. The active layout defaults to QWERTY, and the initial enabled set is seeded from your phone’s own language list plus QWERTY. See Languages overview for how that seeding works.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”Editing a shipped layout doesn’t fork a new one. Change a key on the built-in QWERTY or on a shipped Vietnamese Telex grid, and the edit is stored as an override under that same layout’s id; it doesn’t become a separate custom layout. That’s why the delete button on a shipped row reads “Reset” instead of “Delete”: there’s no copy to delete, only an override to drop, which brings the original grid back.
Duplicating never activates. Copying any layout (shipped or your own) creates a new layout and opens it for editing, but never switches to it. A half-finished copy becoming the live keyboard mid-edit is exactly the situation where you’d be stuck unable to type well enough to undo it.
Two passes keep you from getting locked out: one that only reports, one that actually rewrites. While you’re editing, a continuous check flags problems: a layer with more than 8 rows, a row over 24 keys, a key with zero or non-finite width, a Braille key naming a dot outside 1–6, or a cycled layer (Symbols, Symbols 2, Fn) with no way back to Letters, but never touches your grid. Most of these are marked blocking rather than a warning; a missing Shift key is the one exception, since a symbols-forward layout may not want one.
That reporting pass is what the Languages toggle consults. Try to switch on a layout with a blocking finding and it refuses, with a dialog headed “Fix these problems in the layout editor first:” that names every reason. It’s literally the same list the editor prints, so the two can’t drift apart, and turning a layout off is never blocked. The second pass is the one that rewrites: dropping unrecognised keys, capping an oversized key or row, and, critically, guaranteeing the Letters layer has a delete, space and enter key by adding default ones if they’re missing. It runs on import, when a layout becomes the one you’re typing on, and again each time the keyboard builds the grid to draw. That last one is why editing a layout that’s already switched on is survivable: your changes go live keystroke by keystroke, and the repair puts a backspace key back the moment you delete the last one. It’s deliberately never applied to what’s stored while you edit, because it would fight you, silently regrowing a row you just removed.
Two version numbers, and they mean different things. The file envelope has its own version (currently 1, unused for migration so far; only the format tag itself is checked on import). A layout’s internal spec also carries its own version, separately, bumped when a stored field’s shape changes.
Below is a real shipped layout (the Afar QWERTY grid) rendered from its actual .wmlayout.json file, the same format export and import use:
Hover or tap a key with a corner hint to see all its long-press characters.