indic-keyboards

Sure enough cultures developed differently throughout the years, each with its own language and writing style. However, modern times don’t mean there’s a universal written and spoken language, even though English is internationally used. As such, indic-keyboards comes with customizable keyboard layouts for broader writing styles.

On the one hand, the application isn’t packed inside an installer, so you can take it for a spin as soon as download is done. This means you can also have it stored on a thumb drive in case you need to use it on other computers. On the other hand, it requires Java Runtime Environment to function, so you need to make sure it’s on the target PC.

The application doesn’t really come with its own interface, and quietly sits in the tray area at all times. There is, however, an associated menu which makes it possible to choose the desired keyboard input, as well as to toggle the state of the application’s functionality, so you don’t mess text up in other environments.

As such, accessing the tray menu lets you choose from inputs like Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu, whereas most of them can be used with romanized characters. Toggling the state of the keyboard is done from the tray menu, or a hotkey command you can customize.

You can choose to view the current layout if not exactly sure, and this brings up a virtual keyboard. Sadly, it’s not interactive, but it does make it easier to input particular characters. On the bright side of things, it comes with a custom XML builder which lets you create your own inputs by associating regular character slots with custom Unicode characters.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that indic-keyboards is a pretty practical desktop enhancement, especially if you often have to deal with such indic characters. You can even go ahead and create your own input with custom symbols, making it worth your while overall.