Addons & plugins
Repositories, installed addons, sticker packs and the plugin manager.
The Addons screen is where WM Keyboard reaches past what ships in the app: themes, layouts, dictionaries, fonts, sounds and more, browsed and installed straight from a repository URL. This page is the field reference for every screen in that tree, plus the separate sticker-pack and plugin managers that live alongside it; for the reasoning behind any of it, start with What are addons? and WM Keyboard plugins instead.
Repositories and installed addons
Section titled “Repositories and installed addons”The Addons screen opens with a caption explaining the trust model in plain terms: “Addon repositories are ordinary web pages listing themes, layouts, dictionaries, snippets, sticker packs, icon packs, fonts, emoji fonts and key sounds. Everything they hold is plain data — installing an addon never runs code.” Two buttons follow: Add repository and Refresh (disabled while refreshing, or when the repository list is empty).
Below that:
- Repositories: one row per repository you’ve added: its name (or the raw URL if the manifest doesn’t name itself), a subtitle showing the addon count and author, or “Not loaded yet” / “Couldn’t be read” while a fetch is pending or failed. An overflow menu (⋮) offers Refresh, Open homepage (only if the manifest declares an
https://one), and Remove. Tapping a loaded row opens its catalogue; a row with no manifest yet doesn’t respond to taps. - Installed: only shown once you’ve installed at least one addon: name, then “Type · version · repository name” underneath, tinted by type.
The first time you ever open this screen, it seeds one sample repository automatically (tracked with a marker so it never comes back once removed), and every visit refreshes every repository’s manifest once in the background. An empty repository list shows “No repositories yet. Add one with its URL to browse what it offers.”
Add repository opens a single text field. As you type, a line underneath live-resolves what will actually be fetched, showing “Will read: <url>”, or, if it can’t be resolved, “That isn’t an https address this app can read.”; the Add button stays disabled until it resolves. A github.com/user/repo address resolves to that repository’s wmkeyboard-repo.json on its default branch (or the branch/tag from a /tree/<ref> or /blob/<ref> path); a URL ending in .json is used as-is; anything else has wmkeyboard-repo.json appended. Confirming with an address that can’t be parsed at all shows “That doesn’t look like a repository URL. It has to be an https link — a GitHub repository, or a direct link to a wmkeyboard-repo.json file.”; one that parses but can’t be fetched removes the repository again and shows “Couldn’t read an addon repository at that address.” You can have up to 30 repositories in your list at once.
Browsing a repository and an addon’s page
Section titled “Browsing a repository and an addon’s page”Tapping a loaded repository opens its catalogue: a Search field matching name, description, author and tags case-insensitively, and a row of type filter chips: All, plus one chip per addon type the manifest actually contains. Results render as a two-column card grid; each card shows the addon’s first screenshot (or a centered type glyph if it has none), its name, type, a “vX.Y · size · author” line, and a status badge in the corner that doubles as the install button: a download arrow when not installed, a check when installed, an “Update” chip when a newer version exists, a spinner while downloading, or an X on failure. Tapping the badge installs directly from the grid without opening the addon’s own page. An empty result set says “Nothing here matches that.”; a repository that can’t be read at all says “This repository couldn’t be read. Try refreshing it from the Addons list.”
Tapping a card opens its detail page, which shows, top to bottom:
- Previews, if the manifest has any: a single screenshot renders full-width capped at 340dp tall; more than one renders as a fixed-height horizontal strip. Tapping either opens a full-screen viewer.
- Name, then “Type · version · author”, then the description, then a row of non-interactive tag chips if the manifest declares any.
- A Preview button, shown only for addon types the app knows how to preview without installing (see the table below). It downloads the payload to cache and shows it inline: a snippet list, a dictionary’s word count and first words, an emoji-keyword count and sample rows, a “Play the sound” row, a sticker thumbnail strip, or, for a plugin, the declared permission list under “What this plugin can do”, with the reassurance that “Plugins run in a sandbox. This one cannot see what you type, read your clipboard, or use the internet — those aren’t things a plugin can ask for.”
- A Details group: Repository (name, host, and a note that installing will add it if you haven’t already), Size, Language(s) if declared, and Licence. Tapping the licence row opens the full text in a scrolling dialog.
- If the addon declares a minimum app version newer than your build, a caption says so and disables Install. If the addon is a plugin and “Allow plugins” is off, a caption points you at the switch with an “Open Plugins” shortcut, and Install stays disabled until you turn it on.
- Actions: Install / Update / Installed (disabled once current); an error-tinted Uninstall once installed; a progress bar with Cancel while downloading; and, once installed, an outlined “Use — open
<Type>” button that jumps straight to where the addon lives (see the table below).
If a repository has changed or gone offline since you installed something from it, the detail page falls back to what was saved locally at install time: name, type, version, author, description, and an Uninstall button, with no update comparison available. Reaching a detail page for an addon that no longer exists anywhere shows “That addon couldn’t be found. The repository may have changed.”
After installing
Section titled “After installing”For types with an obvious slot to fill, finishing an install shows a prompt asking whether to switch to it now (see Installing addons for the full question-and-button wording per type). Fonts, dictionaries, emoji keyword packs, snippet packs and sticker packs skip the prompt; they’re live the moment they land.
| Type | Max size | Preview button | “Use” opens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theme | 16 MB | No | Themes |
| Layout | 4 MB | No | Languages → Your layouts |
| Dictionary | 32 MB | Yes | Custom dictionaries |
| Emoji keywords | 8 MB | Yes | Emoji keywords |
| Snippets | 4 MB | Yes | Snippets |
| Stickers | 64 MB | Yes | Sticker packs → Your packs |
| Icon pack | 8 MB | No | Icons → Icon pack |
| Font | 32 MB | No | Fonts → Installed fonts |
| Emoji font | 32 MB | No | Emoji → Emoji font |
| Sound | 4 MB | Yes | Key press → Sound style |
| Sound pack | 16 MB | Yes | Key press → Sound pack |
| Plugin | 1 MB | Yes (capabilities only) | Plugins → Allow plugins |
Sound and Sound pack are two different types. A sound is one recording the whole keyboard uses; a pack is a set of them, one keyboard’s worth of individually recorded keys, which is why it gets four times the size budget (each recording inside it is still held to the same 4 MB a lone sound gets). Both offer a preview, and both land in Key press, just in different rows.
A repository manifest can declare an “Unknown” type too, but the app filters those entries out before they’re ever shown, since it’s a defensive fallback and not something you’ll see as an installable card. See Deep links for the wmkeyboard://addons, wmkeyboard://repo and wmkeyboard://addon links that can open any of these screens directly; none of them install or add a repository on their own.
Managing sticker packs
Section titled “Managing sticker packs”The Sticker packs screen opens with a caption: “Your own stickers, sent from the sticker tool’s ‘My stickers’ tab. Stills are resized to 512×512 WebP so they arrive as real stickers in WhatsApp; animated GIFs are kept as they are and send as images.”
- Your packs: one row per pack: name, “Empty” or a sticker count, a strip of up to six thumbnails, and trailing Export (shares a
.wmstickersfile) and Delete buttons. Deleting asks “Delete<name>? Its N sticker(s) are deleted from this device. Export the pack first if you want to keep a copy.” - New pack: a name dialog, then drops you straight into the new pack. At the cap it instead says “You already have N packs.”
- Import a pack: a file picker for
.wmstickersarchives, reporting “Imported<name>— N stickers.” on success (plus any repair notes), “That file is not a WMKeyboard sticker pack.” or “No stickers could be read out of that pack.” on a bad file, “You already have N packs. Delete one first.” at the cap, or “That file could not be read.” on any other failure.
You can have up to 50 packs, and up to 200 stickers per pack. Opening a pack (route sticker_pack/{packId}, title “Edit sticker pack”) shows its name (tap to rename), an Add stickers row (a photo picker, up to 30 images per trip) with a “N of 200 used” subtitle, and a grid of what’s already inside. An empty pack says “No stickers in this pack — Add some from your photos, or long-press a Klipy or GIPHY sticker in the keyboard.” Tapping a sticker opens an edit dialog: rename, edit its space-separated emoji tags, move it up/down, move it to another pack, or delete it. Adding photos reports how many were added, how many were rejected for being over 2 MB (the animated-file cap) or unreadable as an image, and whether the pack is now full; any source file over 12 MB is rejected before it’s even processed, and a still is always re-encoded down to roughly 100 KB.
Sticker packs have two separate ways to end up in Your packs: the manual New-pack / Add-stickers flow described here, and installing an addon of the Stickers type, which lands in this same list. If a pack appears here that you don’t remember creating, it likely came in through Addons rather than through this screen.
Turning on plugins
Section titled “Turning on plugins”Allow plugins is a subsystem-wide switch, off by default. Its subtitle explains the scope: “Plugins are small tools written by other people that run inside a sandbox on this keyboard. Separate from the Plugins tool on the toolbar, which only decides where the panel appears.” Below it, a static “What a plugin can and can’t do” group lists six facts that never change and aren’t settings: a plugin can’t see what you type, can’t read the field you’re writing in, can’t read your clipboard, and can’t use the internet, but it can draw its own panel and it can save its own data if it declared that permission before you installed it.
With plugins allowed, two more groups appear: Installed (a “Manage <name>” link per plugin, showing “turned off” in its subtitle if disabled, or “No plugins installed yet.” if you have none) and Add (“Install from a file”, restricted to zip/archive file types, with a note that plugins also install from Addons). Either install path shows the same confirmation dialog first: name, description, version, author, and either “It doesn’t ask for anything beyond its own panel.” or a bulleted “It can:” list of the permissions it declared. Installing reports “Installed <name>.”, “That file isn’t a WM Keyboard plugin.”, “You already have N plugins.” at the cap, or “That plugin could not be installed.” on any other failure. The cap is 50 plugins.
Opening a plugin (route plugin/{pluginId}, title “Plugin”) shows its name, description, version and author, then:
- Enabled: a per-plugin switch, independent of “Allow plugins” above. Its subtitle normally reads “Show this plugin in the Plugins panel”, but flips to “Turned off because it stopped responding twice.” once the plugin has been auto-disabled, since WM Keyboard tracks failures per plugin and switches it off on its own after two in a row, rather than leaving a broken panel in your toolbar.
- What it can do: its declared permissions, or “Nothing outside its own panel” if it asked for none.
- Stored data: “Using X KB of Y KB”, where the ceiling is 64 KB per plugin, plus a “Clear stored data” button.
- Log: shown only once the plugin has printed something or errored; the last 40 lines, plus a “Clear log” button.
- Uninstall: a red button that confirms with “Uninstall
<name>? Its script and anything it saved are deleted from this device.”
Options
Section titled “Options”The Addons, catalogue, and addon-detail screens hold no separate preferences of their own: a repository list and an installed-addon record are files, not toggles, so there’s nothing here to reset to a default beyond removing the entries themselves.
WM KeyboardToolsPlugins| Setting | Control | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Allow plugins | Toggle | Off |
Unlike most of this app’s settings, Allow plugins is stored in the plugin subsystem’s own file-backed store rather than the shared KeyboardSettings/DataStore preferences, but it behaves like any other switch from the settings screen.
| Setting | Control | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Toggle | On (per plugin, until auto-disabled) |
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- Settings search doesn’t reach most of this tree. The top-level “Addons” entry is indexed, along with “Plugins”, “Allow plugins”, “Manage plugins” and “Install from a file” under Tools › Plugins, and “Stickers”, “Sticker packs”, “New pack” and “Import a pack” under Tools › Stickers (plus a second “Sticker packs” entry under Backup). The catalogue, an addon’s own detail page, and a plugin’s own detail page have no search entry, so you always reach them by tapping through, not by typing their name into settings search.
- The per-plugin Enabled switch is separate from the subsystem-wide Allow plugins switch. Turning off Allow plugins hides the whole Plugins panel; turning off one plugin’s Enabled switch (by hand, or automatically after two failures) only hides that plugin, leaving the rest running.
- A plugin is the one addon type that must carry a checksum. Every other type’s
sha256is optional and only checked when present; a plugin manifest entry without one is refused outright, because it’s the only type that runs code rather than just being read. - No edition differences. Nothing in the Addons, sticker-pack, or plugin screens, or the caps above, is gated to the full or lite build; both editions install and run the same twelve addon types.
See What are addons? for the trust model behind repositories, Installing addons and Updates & management for the install and update flow in narrative form, and WM Keyboard plugins with Plugin permissions and Plugin security for what a plugin can build and what stops it from doing anything else.