Tools
The master tool list: how to enable, disable, recolour, and open each of the 86 tools' own settings, plus what each tool's in-panel manager does.
The Tools screen is the enable switch and the settings entry point for all 81 of WM Keyboard’s tools. Turn a tool on or off, tint its icon, or tap through to its own options. This page is the field reference for that one screen. For how the toolbar and toolbox work, including pinning, dragging, groups and direct boot, see The toolbar instead.
The tool list
Section titled “The tool list”Reach it from Home → Tools, or by searching “Tools” in settings search. A deep link also works: wmkeyboard://settings/tools.
A search field sits above everything else on the screen, pinned under the title bar so it stays in reach however far down the list you have scrolled. Type into it and the colour toggles and groups give way to a flat Results list. It matches each tool’s name and description, folded so a Bangla install matches text typed in Bangla. Clear the field to bring the groups back.
A Colorful tool icons toggle sits above the list, on by default. It tints each tool’s icon with its own accent colour, here and in the toolbox alike. Turn it off and every icon falls back to the theme’s plain foreground colour.
Built-in file manager, on by default, decides what a tool opens when it wants a file: the keyboard’s own file manager, or with it off, Android’s picker. The Play Store build doesn’t have this switch or the file manager.
Close floating boxes on a tap outside, off by default, is for the tools that can open in a box over other apps. On, a tap anywhere else on the screen closes the box. Taps on the keyboard don’t count.
Turning it on reveals Gradient tool colors underneath, off by default. On, each icon is painted with a two-colour gradient instead of one flat colour, running from its own colour at the top left to a second colour at the bottom right. The second colour is worked out from the first, so you get a gradient without picking anything. To choose both ends by hand, open the tool and set them there. The row is nested under the switch above rather than greyed out, because with the colours off there’d be nothing for a gradient to be made of.
Once you’ve recoloured at least one tool (either end of a gradient counts), a Reset custom colors button appears above the list and clears every per-tool override in one tap. It rides on the same switch: turn Colorful tool icons off and the button goes with the colours, overrides and all, until you turn them back on.
Below that, every tool gets one row: icon, name, a one-line description, an optional tune icon, and a switch. Tap the switch to enable or disable the tool. Tap anywhere else on the row to open that tool’s own settings screen.
Groups
Section titled “Groups”Tools are grouped by what they do, in this order. Each group starts folded shut, and its closed heading names a few of its tools so you can tell what’s inside without opening it. Press the heading to open a group, and the screen remembers which ones you’ve opened next time you visit.
| Group | Tools |
|---|---|
| Panels | Emoji, Clipboard, Snippets, Notes, To-do list, Text editing, Trackpad, Numpad, Handwriting, Voice typing, Camera, Gallery, Dictionary, Vocabulary, Learn from text, Find & replace, Grammar check, App launcher, Media controls, KDE Connect, Smart home, Send files, Music ID |
| Scanners | Text scan (OCR), QR & barcode scanner, Document scanner |
| Online tools | Translate, GIFs, Stickers, Web search, Image search, Wikipedia, Currency converter, Internet speed test, AI writing tools, AI reply |
| Create and convert | Special symbols, Calculator, Unit converter, QR code generator, Password generator, Text repeat, Read back, Typing speed test |
| Keyboard modes | Keyboard modes, One-handed mode, Split keyboard, Floating keyboard, Keep on screen, Resize |
| Cursor | The twelve one-tap cursor moves, Selection mode, plus Hide keyboard |
| Quick actions | Undo, Redo, Copy, Cut, Paste, Autocorrect, Selection actions, English words, Switch language, Fancy text, Secondary layout, Incognito, Sound & haptics, Themes, Power saving, Settings shortcut, Statistics |
| Utilities | Flashlight, Screenshot, Compass, Bubble level, Calendar, Clock, Weather, Location, Moon phase, Plugins |
Panels is the longest group by far. If twenty rows are too many to scan, turn on Split the Panels group, the switch just above the groups. It’s off by default. On, Panels gives way to two groups in the same place: Writing holds Emoji, Clipboard, Snippets, Notes, Text editing, Trackpad, Numpad, Handwriting, Voice typing, Dictionary, Vocabulary, Learn from text, Find & replace and Grammar check, and Connect and media holds Camera, Gallery, App launcher, Media controls, Music ID, KDE Connect and Send files. Each of the two remembers whether you left it open, separately from Panels. The switch only changes this screen: the tool pickers elsewhere in settings, such as the floating button’s, keep the one Panels group.
The two AI tools are also on the Home screen’s AI row, next to the chat and the history. Their switches there and here are the same switch.
A tool that belongs to a feature bundle switched off on Extensions is not on this list at all, nor in any tool picker, until the bundle comes back; its own switch here is kept as it was. The Scanners group, for one, is a bundle in itself.
A tool that a future group forgets to claim still shows. It would fall into a trailing Other catch-all, so nothing ever goes missing from the list. Every tool has a named home today, though, so that catch-all currently has nothing in it and doesn’t appear.
A tune icon marks the tools with settings beyond the switch. Six are toggle-only here, because their real options live somewhere else: Settings (shortcut), Statistics (a shortcut too, whose page only links to the Statistics screen), Themes, Sound & haptics, One-handed mode, and Resize, whose values are all sliders under WM Keyboard Layout & size anyway.
F-Droid build keeps every row of the Scanners group: Text scan reads with PaddleOCR, QR & barcode scanner with zxing-cpp, and the document scanner is the built-in one. Panels keeps all its rows: Handwriting is there too, reading Chinese and Japanese through zinnia. See F-Droid build below for the complete gating rule.
Opening a tool’s own screen
Section titled “Opening a tool’s own screen”Every tool’s detail screen, reached by tapping its row above, starts with its switch, then the tool’s own settings. The rows every tool shares come last, so they never push the tool’s own settings down:
- Turn on: the same switch as on the list screen, repeated here. Its subtitle reads “Show this tool on the toolbar and in the toolbox”.
- The tool’s own settings: see the tool’s guide page, linked from the table below.
- Toolbar and toolbox: a closed fold at the end, its heading naming what it holds. It stays open on that device once you open it.
- Show in toolbox: on by default, and only shown while the tool is on. Switch it off and the tool leaves the toolbox grid but stays on everywhere else: pinned on the toolbar, opened by its keyword, reached from selection actions or a hardware leader-key letter. It is for a tool you only ever reach one of those other ways, such as AI through a selection action, so the grid is one cell shorter. Each tool has its own switch.
- Icon colour: only shown while Colorful tool icons is on. Tap it to open the colour picker for just this tool’s icon. The row reads Auto until you customise it, then shows the swatch with a restore control beside it. With Gradient tool colors on as well, this one row becomes two: Icon colour, top left and Icon colour, bottom right, one per end of the gradient. Leave the bottom-right one alone and it keeps tracking whatever you pick for the top left.
- Press and hold: what a press and hold on the tool does while it is pinned to the toolbar.
- Keyword shortcut: a collapsed card, shown only for the tools that ship a built-in keyword. Tap its header to open it, and it stays open on that device. It holds a “Trigger words” field and a Match capitals switch, plus a “Reset to defaults” row once you’ve edited the words. Type one of a tool’s words on its own (
wiki,calc,qr, and so on) and a chip appears that opens the tool. Smart chips documents the feature in full. This screen only lets you edit or clear the words for one tool at a time. While smart chips or Tool keywords are off, a note under the card says so, and its Turn on button switches both on from here.
The tool’s own settings are specific to it, and most of them are already covered on that tool’s own guide page, linked from the table below rather than repeated here. Where a tool page used to repeat a switch that another screen owns (the emoji key on the toolbar, the split gap, the floating width, automatic incognito, the three smart-chip switches), it now shows a row with the current value that opens the owner.
Managers built into a tool’s screen
Section titled “Managers built into a tool’s screen”A handful of tools carry something bigger than a row of toggles: a model downloader, a list editor, a location picker. They live inside that tool’s own detail screen, or, where they belong to one provider of a provider list, on that provider’s own screen. None of them is a separate destination in Settings’ navigation, apart from the three exceptions called out at the bottom of this table.
| Tool | What’s there | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Voice typing | The Recognition engine provider list. Each engine’s own screen, opened from its row, holds its models (Whisper, Whistle, Asr4All, Parakeet, Moonshine, Sherpa, Omnilingual, Vosk), Recognition service and Prefer on-device recognition (the phone’s recognizer) or what a transcription server is sent with | Default engine is Phone’s recognizer. Whisper’s screen adds Translate to English (off by default) above the model list, and Compute (Automatic, CPU or GPU; Automatic by default) once a whisper.cpp model is downloaded. A transcription server’s setup sheet takes Server address, Endpoint path, Model and API key, with a Test button; its screen adds Send the keyboard language (on by default), the prompt and the server languages. Full details: Voice typing, Offline voice (Whisper), Transcription server. |
| AI writing tools | An AI providers list (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, DeepSeek, Brave Answers, Ollama, LM Studio, OpenAI-compatible services, On your device), each row with its own screen (its key, address and model, its extra headers, and for On your device the local-model manager), an In use choice, plus the action list, the changes view and the history. The Chat group adds suggested follow-up questions and Deep research’s depth and plan review | On your device is the only kind not offered on F-Droid build. See AI tools. |
| AI reply | Replies per run, length, emoji, what the drafts should know about you, reply language, how much conversation is sent, how screenshots are read, whether the copies it used are cleared afterwards, and whether drafts are kept in the AI history | Borrows the AI tool’s provider and key. Reading a screenshot on the device is Not on F-Droid. See AI reply. |
| Handwriting | A recognition-model manager, one entry per typed language, and, where ML Kit is in the build, Offline recogniser for Chinese and Japanese (off by default) | Each model is an on-demand download, roughly 8 MB to 26 MB from ML Kit, 26 MB to 52 MB for zinnia’s. See Handwriting. |
| Snippets | Full add/edit/delete list, plus import and export | Stored as a JSON file the tool manages itself. See Snippets & text expansion. |
| Weather | A location picker with Use my location, a Fahrenheit toggle (off by default), and Fetch the forecast as you type (on by default, off in the F-Droid edition) | See Instruments. |
| Clock | An Open the clock row for the Clock screen, the grants an alarm still needs, the hour format, seconds, the default format, the alarm and timer sounds, vibration, snooze, fade in, when a ring stops, volume keys, the Pomodoro lengths, the planner’s working hours and how long history is kept | See Clock. |
| Gallery | Photo access, what a tap does, columns, the camera tile, videos, fast scroll, the starting height, the last album, haptics, the picture size, how many can be picked, the caption, where a refused send goes, closing after a send, keeping edited photos, and the privacy switches (location, camera details, random names, the sent list) | The Play Store build has no grid, so it shows only the size, the limit, the fallback and the privacy rows. See Gallery. |
| Location | The default format, the map a link opens, the precision, the address lookup, locate on open, a custom template with a live example, the saved places, and the permission | See Location. |
| Music ID | The Song recognisers provider list (AudD, ACRCloud, AudioTag, Shazam via RapidAPI, your own server), what Insert types, the picture style, the store a link opens, how long it listens, the now-playing check, and the history | Every recogniser needs a key of yours; the tool stays off until one is set up. See Music ID. |
| Send files | The Send instance (a list of public ones and your own), the default expiry, download count and password of a new link, what happens to the link once it is ready, the chip that offers to receive a pasted or copied link, opening a received file, Nearby and the direct link between two phones, the share sheet entry, and the history | See Send files. |
| Typing speed test | The default test’s mode and length, its Punctuation and Numbers switches, a Typing aids group (Glide typing, Suggestions), a Records group (tests completed, recent average, best score per test length and language, and a “Clear records” row once there’s something to clear), then an Achievements group | See Utility tools. |
| Internet speed test | The run (seconds per direction, connections at once, Measure upload, Unit), the Result card (Style, Size, Layout, how a sticker-sized card is sent, Save sent cards to the gallery, Show my IP address), then the Servers list | See Internet speed test. |
| Plugins | A “Manage plugins” row | This one opens a separate screen. WM Keyboard Tools Plugins is an entry point into Plugins overview, not an inline manager. |
| Stickers | A “Sticker packs” row alongside the tool’s own settings, and a Suggest while typing group: Offer your stickers as you type (on by default), Where they show (Tray, On the strip or One chip, default Tray; the tray’s place is set under Rows & bars) and After you send one (Remove the typed text or Keep the typed text, default Remove) and Hold to see them bigger (on by default: hold a sticker in the tray to see it large, slide to see the others) | Also a separate screen. See Stickers and Stickers as you type. Under Sticker packs, Create stickers has its own Engines list (On this phone, and online image services, Pollinations and AI Horde starting off) and an engine chooser above the prompt; see Engines. |
| Media controls | A “Music players” row, plus a notification-access row that reports the grant | Also a separate screen. The picker lists every installed app, players first. See Media controls. |
F-Droid build
Section titled “F-Droid build”F-Droid build hides no tool. Text scan (OCR) stays, reading Chinese, Japanese and Latin-script text with PaddleOCR on MNN, and its Text recognition row offers only Automatic and Online model there.
Grammar check stays: F-Droid compiles Harper from source. Handwriting stays too, with zinnia in place of ML Kit, so it reads Chinese and Japanese only. Two more flags narrow what’s inside a tool without removing the tool itself. Whisper’s LiteRT models are left out, and the On your device AI provider runs only GGUF models on llama.cpp, since LiteRT and LiteRT-LM are Google’s. AI writing tools and Voice typing still exist there, and still have a settings row, with fewer choices on it.
Document scanner is in every build and on every phone: Google’s scanner where Google Play services can run it, the keyboard’s built-in scanner everywhere else. QR & barcode scanner is too: it reads with ML Kit where ML Kit’s barcode reader can run and with zxing-cpp everywhere else, and its settings screen has Read codes with zxing-cpp to pick the open-source reader where both can.
Every tool’s guide page
Section titled “Every tool’s guide page”Every tool is documented somewhere outside this reference page, so use this table to jump straight to a tool’s full write-up instead of hunting for it:
| Guide page | Tools covered |
|---|---|
| The toolbar | Pinning, toolbox groups, direct boot, hardware leader key (mechanics for all 86) |
| Custom layouts & the layout editor | Secondary layout |
| Clipboard manager | Clipboard |
| Snippets & text expansion | Snippets |
| Text editing & cursor tools | Text editing, all fourteen cursor tools, Undo, Redo, Numpad |
| Trackpad | Trackpad |
| KDE Connect | KDE Connect |
| Smart home | Home Assistant, Google Home, SmartThings, Hue, openHAB, Smart Life (Tuya), SwitchBot |
| Send files | Send files |
| Handwriting | Handwriting |
| Camera tool | Camera |
| Voice typing | Voice typing |
| Offline voice (Whisper) | Whisper (part of Voice typing) |
| Scanner | Text scan (OCR), QR & barcode scanner, Document scanner |
| Translate | Translate |
| Search & Wikipedia | Web search, Image search, Wikipedia, Dictionary |
| Vocabulary | Vocabulary |
| Notes | Notes |
| To-do list | To-do list |
| AI tools | AI writing tools |
| AI reply | AI reply |
| Read back and offline voices | Read back |
| Utility tools | Calculator, Unit converter, Currency converter, Special symbols, QR code generator, Password generator, Text repeat, Typing speed test |
| Instruments | Flashlight, Compass, Bubble level, Moon phase, Weather, Screenshot |
| Internet speed test | Internet speed test |
| Location | Location |
| Clock | Clock |
| Music ID | Music ID |
| Gallery | Gallery |
| Media controls | Media controls |
| Calendar | Calendar |
| Emoji picker | Emoji |
| GIFs | GIFs |
| Stickers | Stickers |
| Plugins overview | Plugins |
| Size & position | One-handed mode, Split keyboard, Floating keyboard, Keep on screen |
| Statistics | Statistics |
| Resize the keyboard | Resize |
| App launcher | App launcher |
| Power saving | Power saving |
| Modes & the symbol row | Keyboard modes |
| Sound & haptics | Sound & haptics |
| Autocorrect | Autocorrect |
| Selection actions | Selection actions |
| Mixed-language typing | English words |
| Grammar | Grammar check |
| Themes overview | Themes |
| Incognito & secure fields | Incognito |
Settings (the shortcut tool) has no guide page of its own. It opens this settings app and does nothing else.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- Setup decides what starts enabled, not the shipped default. The shipped default is all 86 tools on, but you only ever see it after a settings reset. The setup wizard overwrites it the moment you answer its “how much keyboard do you want” question: 8 tools for “keep it simple”, 22 for the middle answer, 43 for “show me everything”, or all 86 if you tap Everything on its Tools page. Answering “extra strict” on privacy adds Incognito. A set that loses tools this build or device can’t run (grammar, handwriting, the scanners) gets Wikipedia and Power saving in their place, so the exact count moves a little. The wizard only writes over an untouched default, so a reinstall with your settings intact keeps your selection.
- Disabling a tool is one switch, not three. The tool disappears from the toolbar, the toolbox, and its hardware leader-key letter at the same moment. The one piece you can drop on its own is the toolbox: Show in toolbox on the tool’s own screen takes it out of the grid and leaves it working everywhere else.
- Folders and the toolbox search live on the keyboard. Neither has a switch here. You make a folder by dropping one tool on the middle of another in the toolbox, and the magnifier at the top of the toolbox searches it by name. See Folders and Searching the toolbox. Folders are part of a settings backup.
- A tool hidden from the toolbox can still be pinned. If it is already on the toolbar it stays there. Drag it off the bar and it unpins without landing in the grid, since the grid no longer takes it; turn Show in toolbox back on to see it there again.
- The tune icon is a hint, not a guarantee of depth. Some tools with a tune icon add only one or two settings past the shared Turn on, Icon colour and Keyword shortcut rows. The icon means “there’s at least one more setting,” not “there’s a lot here.”
- A tool’s icon colour override survives disabling and re-enabling it. Turning a tool off and back on doesn’t reset any customisation made on its detail screen.
- Build-gated tools leave no trace. A tool a build doesn’t carry never appears as a disabled row: not in this list, not in settings search, not in the toolbox. Every build carries every tool today, the F-Droid one included.
- Rows here get the same restore button as everywhere else. Any switch or colour you’ve moved off its shipped value grows a small reset icon. See putting one setting back for how it behaves.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”- The toolbar: pinning, dragging, toolbox groups, direct boot, and the hardware leader key.
- Appearance: toolbar display options such as height, labels and grid size, plus where pinning itself is configured.
- Smart chips: keyword chips, including the “Tool keywords” toggle that turns this screen’s per-tool trigger words on or off globally.
- Which build you have: the complete edition comparison, tools included.