Instruments
Flashlight, compass, bubble level, moon phase, and weather: glanceable tools between sentences.
“Instruments” is this site’s name for five small utility tools (Flashlight, Compass, Bubble level, Moon phase, and Weather) that Settings groups together as “Utilities,” alongside Calendar, so you never have to leave the keyboard to check one. Four of the five open as a panel that replaces the key rows; Flashlight is the odd one out, a single tap with no panel at all.
Open any of the five from the toolbar (if you’ve pinned it) or the toolbox. None of the five ships pinned to the toolbar by default, and none is part of the onboarding wizard’s recommended starter set, so the first time you want one you’ll likely find it in the toolbox rather than the toolbar. The toolbox itself doesn’t label a “Utilities” section the way Settings does, but its default ranking keeps these five (plus Calendar and Wikipedia) clustered together near the end of the grid, after the everyday text tools. None of the five needs an Android runtime permission: the torch doesn’t need the CAMERA permission (that’s only for the separate camera tool), and Weather’s location is typed or searched, never read from the device’s GPS. None is limited to either edition: Full and Lite behave identically across all five.
Flashlight: a one-tap torch
Section titled “Flashlight: a one-tap torch”Tapping Flashlight turns the device’s torch on or off immediately. There’s no panel to open or close. If the device has no flash, a toast says “This device has no flashlight” and nothing else happens.
The toolbox tile also mirrors the torch’s real state: if you flip the torch on from the system quick-settings tile instead of the keyboard, the Flashlight tile lights up to match, and turning it off from either place turns it off in both.
Options
Section titled “Options”- Auto-off with keyboard — on by default. On, closing the keyboard or switching apps switches the torch off with it, so it’s never left burning in your pocket. Off, the torch stays on until you toggle it again, from the tool or the system quick-settings tile.
Compass, with an optional qibla bearing
Section titled “Compass, with an optional qibla bearing”Compass draws a live rose from the device’s rotation-vector sensor, with a fixed needle at the top marking the way you’re actually facing. The heading glides smoothly rather than jumping with every sensor sample, and if a device has no orientation sensor at all the panel just says so instead of drawing an empty rose.
Turn on Show qibla and a 🕋 marker rides the rose, pointing toward the Kaaba, but the compass has no location field of its own. It reuses whatever location you’ve already saved in the Weather tool’s settings; without one saved, the panel prints “Qibla needs a saved location (weather tool settings)” instead of a bearing. Everything is calculated on-device from that saved latitude and longitude. The compass itself never touches the network.
Options
Section titled “Options”- Degree readout — on by default. Shows the numeric heading and a 16-point cardinal (N, NNE, NE, … NNW) under the rose; while the sensor hasn’t reported yet it reads “Calibrating…” instead.
- Show qibla — off by default. If you turn this on before saving a location, the settings screen itself shows a caution: “No location saved yet — set one under Tools → Weather.”
Bubble level
Section titled “Bubble level”Bubble level turns the accelerometer (or the gravity sensor, if the device has one) into three gauges at once: a circular bullseye bubble that combines pitch and roll, plus a vertical and a horizontal tube vial that each track one axis alone. The bullseye turns accent-colored once both pitch and roll are within about a degree of flat; each tube vial turns accent-colored independently, on its own single-axis threshold, so it’s possible for a vial to read level a moment before or after the bullseye agrees.
Options
Section titled “Options”- Angle readout — on by default. Shows pitch and roll in degrees below the gauges, colored to match the bullseye’s flat/not-flat state.
Moon phase
Section titled “Moon phase”Moon phase is arithmetic, not a lookup: the panel computes the current phase from a fixed synodic-month constant and a reference new moon, with nothing fetched over the network. It’s accurate to within a few hours, which is plenty for “is it worth looking up tonight” but not built for precise astronomical prediction.
The panel shows a painted lit/dark disc, one of eight phase names (New moon, Waxing crescent, First quarter, Waxing gibbous, Full moon, Waning gibbous, Last quarter, Waning crescent), the percentage illuminated, how many days into the roughly 30-day cycle you are, and the dates of the next full and new moon.
Options
Section titled “Options”- Southern hemisphere — off by default. Mirrors the lit disc the way the moon actually looks south of the equator; it only changes the drawing, not the phase name, dates, or illumination percentage.
Weather
Section titled “Weather”Weather shows current conditions and a same-day high/low for one saved location, sourced from Open-Meteo (no account and no API key required). You set the location yourself by searching a city or place name (which hits Open-Meteo’s geocoding endpoint) or typing latitude/longitude directly; the keyboard never requests device location access to fill this in for you.
A fetched result is cached for 15 minutes, so reopening the panel is usually instant; a refresh button in the panel forces a new request. Until you save a location the panel shows a prompt with an Open settings shortcut instead of any weather data, and if a fetch fails it shows a retry button rather than stale numbers.
Once a location is set, the panel shows an emoji and short description for the current conditions, the place name with today’s high and low, and a wrapping grid of stats: feels-like temperature, humidity, and wind speed with an 8-point cardinal direction always appear, and rain chance, cloud cover, pressure, UV index, sunrise, and sunset each appear only when Open-Meteo’s response actually includes them.
Options
Section titled “Options”
- Location — unset by default. Opens a dialog with a search field (backed by Open-Meteo’s geocoding API) and manual latitude/longitude fields for entering coordinates yourself, if you’d rather skip the search.
- Fahrenheit — off by default, so temperatures show in Celsius until you turn this on. It moves the temperatures and nothing else: current, feels-like, and the day’s high and low. Wind speed stays in km/h whichever way this is set, because there’s no separate unit for it, and pressure stays in hPa for the same reason.
Those two rows are the whole screen. In particular the 15-minute cache isn’t adjustable: it’s a fixed value in the keyboard rather than a setting, so the refresh button in the panel is the only way to pull fresh conditions sooner than that.
The settings screen’s own privacy note: “Weather and place search both use Open-Meteo, only when you use them — the keyboard makes no other network requests.” Weather is the only one of the five instruments that reaches the network at all; see network policy for what every network-touching feature sends and when.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”- None have a default hardware-keyboard letter. Unlike tools such as web search (W) or dictionary (D), none of these five instruments ships with a leader-key letter out of the box. Reach them through the toolbox shortcut (double-tap Ctrl, then T) or rebind a letter to one yourself.
- Four keep working before your first unlock; Weather doesn’t. Flashlight, Compass, Bubble level, and Moon phase are all direct-boot safe: they’re pure sensor readings or arithmetic, so they work even right after a restart, before you’ve entered your PIN or pattern for the first time. Weather is the one exception in this group: it needs network access and reads a location saved in credential-encrypted storage, neither of which is available until you unlock.
- Every tool here has more than a bare switch. Each of the five gets a “Tune” icon in WM KeyboardTools, meaning it has real options beyond the shared Enabled toggle; none of them is one of the toggle-only tools on that screen.
- Turning colored tool icons on under WM KeyboardTools tints each of these five with its own accent color in the toolbox (and in the Tools list itself); the pinned toolbar row keeps the theme’s plain icon color regardless, same as every other tool.
For the toolbar/toolbox mechanics these five share with every other tool (pinning, the toolbox drag, and what “direct-boot safe” means more broadly), see the toolbar.