The toolbar

WM Keyboard ships 63 tools (panels, sensors, generators, and one-tap actions), but only a handful sit on the toolbar at once. The rest wait one tap away in the toolbox, and you decide which is which by dragging tools between the two.

Screenshot pending

The toolbar's default row (Emoji, Clipboard, Settings) with the toolbox grid open below it.

Pinning and reordering

The toolbar is a strip of pinned tools; the toolbox (the grid button on the toolbar) holds every other enabled tool that isn’t pinned. A tool never appears in both places at once. Out of the box, only three tools are pinned: Emoji, Clipboard, and Settings. Everything else starts in the toolbox, ranked roughly by how often people reach for it (expressive media first, then everyday text helpers, then keyboard tweaks, then the specialty and sensor tools last).

Open the toolbox and hold-and-drag a tool:

• Drag a toolbox tool up onto the toolbar to pin it.
• Drag a tool around inside the toolbox grid to reorder it there.
• Drag a pinned toolbar tool back down into the toolbox to unpin it.

It’s the same drag-to-pin model Gboard uses. The first time you open the toolbox, a hint explains the drag. Dismiss it and it only resurfaces occasionally as a reminder.

If you picked Recommended rather than Everything during onboarding, note that “recommended” only controls which tools are enabled (visible anywhere at all), not which are pinned: the pinned row is always just Emoji, Clipboard, and Settings until you drag something onto it yourself. Head to WM Keyboard›Tools to turn a disabled tool back on if you don’t see it in the toolbox.

A keyboard mode can also carry its own pinned toolbar, separate from this global one; switching into that mode swaps the whole row. That’s covered on the modes page, not here.

Two ways to draw the toolbox

WM Keyboard›Appearance›Toolbar

Toolbox layout picks between them:

• Icons (the default) is the grid you’ve seen above: a round icon per tool with its name in small text underneath, 4 to a row. Compact, and the most tools on screen at once.
• Pills gives each tool a wide rounded row instead, two to a row. The icon sits on the left in the tool’s own color, the name reads across the middle at full size, and tools that open something get a small arrow on the right. That last part is the reason to use it: Themes and Clipboard take you somewhere, while Flashlight and Undo just do their thing and leave the keys where they are, and the arrow tells you which is which before you tap.

Two settings only apply to pills. Pills per row goes from 1 to 3 (one gives every name the full width, three really only fits in landscape). Fill pills with the tool color paints the whole pill in the tool’s accent color and flips the icon and name to white, or to near-black where the accent is too pale for white to read on. It needs Colorful tool icons (under WM Keyboard›Tools) to be on, since that’s where the colors come from in the first place.

Either layout still drags the same way: hold a tool to pick it up, drop it on the toolbar to pin it or elsewhere in the grid to reorder.

Scrolling or pages

By default the toolbox is one grid that scrolls up and down. Turn on Swipe the toolbox in pages and it splits into fixed pages you swipe sideways instead, with dots underneath showing where you are. Tools per page sets how many each one holds (12 by default, anywhere from 4 to 40).

The trade is muscle memory against reach. Paging keeps every tool at the same spot on the same page every time, so you learn where things are instead of hunting for them mid-scroll. Scrolling gets you to the far end faster. Paging works with both layouts.

Pick a page size that’s a multiple of your row size and every page comes out with full rows. Ask for more tools than fit the panel’s height and the page will scroll as well as swipe, which rather defeats the point.

Browsing all 63 tools

WM Keyboard›Tools

Every tool has a settings screen, with its own Enabled switch plus whatever options it has, under Settings → Tools. At the top of that screen, Colorful tool icons (on by default) tints each tool’s icon with its own accent color, on the toolbar and in the toolbox alike; turn it off and every icon falls back to the theme’s plain foreground color. Below that, the list is grouped by what the tools do: Panels, Scanners, Online tools, Create and convert, Keyboard modes, Cursor, Quick actions, and Utilities, with any tool a future group forgets to claim falling into an Other catch-all so it’s never invisible. Tapping a row’s switch enables or disables the tool everywhere (toolbar, toolbox, and hardware leader key); tapping the row itself opens that tool’s own settings. A small tune icon marks tools that have settings beyond the switch. Most do, but six (Settings, Themes, Sound & haptics, One-handed, Media controls, and Resize) are toggle-only here because their real options live on other settings screens.

Related pages cover most of these tools in depth: Clipboard manager, Snippets & text expansion, Text editing & cursor tools, Handwriting, Camera tool, Voice typing, Offline voice (Whisper), Scanner (OCR, QR, documents), Translate, Search & Wikipedia, AI tools, Utility tools, Media controls, Calendar, App launcher, Resize, and Instruments (flashlight, compass, level, moon phase, weather). The master tool list is being built out on Reference → Tools.

Panels and captured keys

Most tools that need input (search boxes, the AI prompt, the typing-test scorer, a plugin’s own text field) open a panel that captures the keyboard: while it’s focused, what you type goes into that panel’s own box, not into the app behind it. This matters most for backspace: word-deleting the field behind an open panel would edit text you can’t currently see, so the keyboard routes deletes into the panel instead for as long as it’s open.

Sensor and generator tools (Compass, Level, Moon phase, Weather, Calendar, Calculator, Unit converter, Currency converter, Password generator, Media controls, Camera, the scanners, and Handwriting among them) work differently: they replace the key rows entirely rather than intercepting keystrokes, since there’s no letter row to type on while they’re open in the first place.

To back out of any open panel:

• Tap the back arrow that replaces the toolbox button while a panel is open.
• Press the system Back button or gesture, which closes the panel instead of dismissing the keyboard.
• On a hardware keyboard, press Esc, if Esc closes the tool is on (it is by default).

Which tools work before you unlock your phone

Some tools stay usable during direct boot: the window right after a restart, before you’ve entered your PIN or pattern for the first time, when the keyboard has no access to its stored data. WM Keyboard exposes 38 of its 63 tools during this window: everything that’s pure arithmetic, a sensor reading, or a control over the keyboard’s own on-screen state (Emoji, Text editing, Numpad, Symbols, One-handed, Split, Floating, Resize, Hide keyboard, Themes, Autocorrect, Sound & haptics, Incognito, Modes, Fancy text, Undo, Redo, Power saving, Calculator, Unit converter, Password generator, QR generator, Flashlight, Compass, Level, Moon phase, and all twelve cursor tools). Anything backed by a file on disk (Clipboard, Snippets, Camera, downloaded speech or AI models), anything that needs a credential (Translate, the online searches, AI), anything that reads a content provider behind the lock screen (Calendar), or anything that has to launch a separate activity (Settings, the document scanner) sits out until you unlock. This set isn’t a toggle anywhere; it’s automatic, and only applies during that specific before-first-unlock window.

That’s a different thing from the “Hide toolbar & clipboard on lock screen” option under WM Keyboard›Appearance›Toolbar (off by default), which hides the entire toolbar (not a filtered subset) any time the phone’s screen is currently locked, even long after you’ve unlocked it once since the last restart. Turn that on if you don’t want a pinned tool or the suggestion strip visible while replying to a notification from the lock screen.

Hardware shortcuts and the leader key

WM Keyboard›Typing›Physical keyboard

With a physical keyboard attached, double-tap Ctrl (the default leader), then press a letter to jump straight to a tool, no touching the screen. About two dozen tools have a default letter (Emoji is E, Clipboard is C, Voice is V, and so on); press T after the leader to open the full toolbox instead, or ? to expand the on-screen hint into a two-column legend of every binding. The full mechanics, plus how to rebind the leader and every letter, live on Hardware keyboards.

This is one part of a broader hardware-keyboard settings group: the leader itself, arrow-key navigation inside an open panel, and whether Esc closes a panel are all separate switches there, each on by default.

Options

WM Keyboard›Appearance›Toolbar

• Show the toolbar: on by default. Turning it off reclaims its height for the keys, but also hides suggestions and every pinned tool, so Settings warns you before you do it.
• Swipe down to hide: off by default. A downward flick anywhere on the toolbar dismisses the keyboard.
• Only toolbar with hardware keyboard: off by default. With a physical keyboard attached, drop the on-screen keys and keep just the toolbar strip.
• Reverse order for RTL languages: on by default. Mirrors the pinned tool order when the active layout’s script runs right-to-left.
• Spread tools across the bar: on by default. Pinned tools split the available width evenly instead of packing to the left.
• Scroll the toolbar: off by default. Lets pinned tools scroll sideways instead of shrinking to fit; turning it on forces the packed (non-spread) layout.
• Hide toolbar & clipboard on lock screen: off by default. See above.
• Toolbar height: 44dp by default, adjustable from 32–80dp.
• Tool labels: off by default. Shows each tool’s name under its icon; label size is 10sp by default when on.
• Reset pinned tools: restores the toolbar to Emoji, Clipboard, and Settings, after a confirmation. This always resets the global row, even while a mode with its own pinned toolbar is active. To change what a mode itself pins, edit that mode instead. It resets the pinned row only, not the order you dragged the toolbox into; see below.
• Tool circle radius: 20dp by default (a full circle behind each icon, Gboard-style). Lower values give a rounded square; 0 removes the background entirely.
• Tool background shape: Rounded by default. The outline of that background, from the same set of shapes the keys and popups use. Only shown while the radius above is over 0, since at 0 there’s no background to shape.
• Tool background width: 38dp by default, adjustable from 38–64dp. 38 is the classic circle; wider stretches it into a pill, which pairs well with a low corner radius and a scrolling bar.
• Toolbox layout: Icons by default; Pills is the wide-row alternative. See above.
• Toolbox grid size: 4 tools per row by default, adjustable from 3–6. Icons layout only.
• Pills per row: 2 by default, adjustable from 1–3. Pills layout only.
• Fill pills with the tool color: off by default. Pills layout only, and needs Colorful tool icons on.
• Swipe the toolbox in pages: off by default. See above.
• Tools per page: 12 by default, adjustable from 4–40. Only shown once paging is on.

Details & edge cases

• A tool that’s disabled under WM Keyboard›Tools disappears from the toolbar, the toolbox, and its hardware leader-key letter all at once, since there’s a single switch, not three.
• Five tools depend on ML Kit and are Full edition only: Handwriting, OCR, QR scan, Document scanner, and Grammar. The lite edition ships 58 of the 63 tools rather than 63, and a build-gated tool gets no settings row at all, never a switch you can’t turn on.
• Document scanner has a second gate on top of that one: it’s an activity inside Google Play services, not this app’s own code, so it’s hidden on any device without Play services even on Full edition only. OCR and QR scan stay put there, since their models ship in the APK and run with no Play services at all.
• Nothing restores the toolbox order. Once you’ve dragged tools around the grid, that arrangement is yours for good. Reset pinned tools rewrites the pinned row and nothing else, and the toolbox order isn’t a settings row anywhere, so it has no restore button of its own either. The only way back to the shipped ranking is resetting the whole app from Backup & restore.
• Toolbar reordering is per-installation, not per-language: pinning a tool applies everywhere, not just while a particular language is active. A keyboard mode’s own toolbar override is the one exception; see above.
• The toolbox shows only tools that are both enabled and not already pinned, so enabling a tool that’s already pinned won’t create a second entry in the toolbox.
• With paging on, a drag reorders within the page you’re holding it over. The pages don’t flip under your finger, so moving a tool to another page means dragging it onto the toolbar first, then off again on the page you want. Dragging up onto the toolbar to pin works from any page.
• The pill layout’s arrow follows what the tool actually does, not what kind of tool it is. Document scanner gets one because it opens Google’s full-screen scanner, and Settings gets one because it opens the settings app, even though neither is a keyboard panel.
• Tool icon colors only apply when Colorful tool icons is on; with it off, every tool icon uses the theme’s plain foreground color regardless of any per-tool override you’ve set.