LeanType

LeanType

🚀 Overview

LeanType combines the trusted, lightweight, privacy-focused foundation of HeliBoard with modern productivity features: Multi-Provider Cloud, Self-Hosted & Offline AI proofreading, On-Device Whisper Voice Typing, Handwriting Recognition, In-Keyboard Offline Camera & Screenshot OCR, GIF Search & Media Picker, CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) Engine, Hexagonal Honeycomb Layouts, Real-time Inline Math Calculations, Zero-Latency Custom Sound Packs, Live System Wallpaper Blur, Auto Floating in Landscape, Smart Toolbar Auto-Spanning, Built-in Self-Updater, and Rich Text Tools, while keeping you in complete control over your data.

📸 Screenshots

📦 Flavor Comparison

LeanType is available in two purpose-built flavors designed to match your exact privacy preferences, hardware specifications, and feature requirements:

✨ Features

🤖 AI Integration & Smart Tools

• Multi-Provider Cloud & Self-Hosted AI: Integrated proofreading, grammar correction, and text rewriting powered by Google Gemini, Groq (Llama 3.3, Mixtral, DeepSeek), OpenAI, or any Self-Hosted local LLM server (Ollama, LM Studio, LocalAI, vLLM, or custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints).
• Dynamic Model Fetching: Automatically fetches and populates the latest available model IDs directly from your cloud or self-hosted provider.
• 🛡️ Offline Neural Proofreading (GGUF): Run compact, quantized GGUF language models directly on your device via embedded llama.cpp (100% private, zero network access in offline flavor).
• 🌐 Multi-Mode In-Keyboard Translation: Translate text directly into any language without switching apps. Choose between Offline Translation Plugin (supported across all flavors), Built-in Offline Translation (ML Kit), or your configured Cloud / Self-Hosted AI Provider (Gemini, Groq, OpenAI, Ollama) with seamless fallback.
• 🧠 Custom AI Keys & Capsules: Assign custom prompts, personas (#editor, #proofread), and themed tag capsules to 10 customizable toolbar keys.

🈲 Multilingual & CJK Support

• CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) Plugin Engine: Complete East Asian language typing via companion plugin without bloating the core app.
• Chinese Pinyin: Smart Pinyin input engine with fuzzy matching, syllable segmentation, and contextual multi-character phrase predictions (Simplified and Traditional).
• Japanese Kana & Romaji: 12-key Flick input and standard QWERTY Romaji with live Kana-to-Kanji candidate dictionary lookups.
• Korean Hangul: 2-Set (Dubeolsik) and 10-key Chunjiin layouts with real-time on-the-fly Jamo syllable combiner (Choseong, Jungseong, Jongseong).
• Dynamic Candidate Strip: High-performance scrolling candidate bar with expansion grid overlay and frequency-weighted ranking.

📷 Offline Camera & Screenshot OCR

• In-Keyboard Camera Viewfinder: Open a live camera viewfinder directly inside the keyboard to extract printed or handwritten text with 1 tap.
• Screenshot Suggestion Pill: Automatically detects newly captured screenshots and displays a compact suggestion pill ([OCR] [Screenshot] [X]) for immediate 1-tap text extraction.
• Advanced Text Cleaners & Formatting: Clean and format recognized text with options for casing transformations, line joining, dehyphenation, punctuation normalization, bullet/list-marker stripping, whitespace trimming, and noise filtering.
• Customizable Actions: Automatic clipboard copying, direct insertion into active text fields, persistent flash toggle, and search indexing.

🎙️ Voice & Handwriting Input

• On-Device Whisper Voice Typing: High-accuracy speech recognition powered by compact quantized Whisper models via the LeanType Voice Plugin.
• Interactive Voice Toolbar: Real-time waveform audio visualizer, silence detection sensitivity slider, and background keep-alive options.
• ✍️ Handwriting Recognition: Draw characters or words directly on an expansive writing canvas using the LeanType Handwriting Plugin (supported across all flavors), with dedicated settings and in-app/offline model management.

⌨️ Layouts, Audio & Typing

• ⬡ Hexagonal Honeycomb Layout Engine: Typewise-style (hex_typewise) and hexagonal QWERTY (hex_qwerty) layouts with enlarged touch targets, mathematical axial hit-testing, gesture flicks, and ergonomic landscape thumb split.
• 🎵 Custom Sound Packs & Audio Customization: Native zero-latency key audio engine with 12+ built-in sound styles (iOS Tap, Mechanical Cherry MX, Thocky Mechanical, Vintage Typewriter, Retro CRT Terminal, Bubble Pop, Soft Velvet, Woodblock Minimal, Acoustic Marimba, Modern Crisp Tick, Sci-Fi, 8-Bit Chiptune Arcade), live sample audition, remote sound pack catalog, and custom .zip pack import.
• 👆 Gesture / Glide Typing: Smooth swipe typing powered by native C++ libraries (libjni_latinime.so).
• 👆 Full Keyboard & 2D Backspace Swipe Gestures: Edge-to-edge horizontal swipes across the full keyboard to switch languages, glide the cursor, or toggle numpad, plus 2D multidirectional backspace gestures for vertical multi-line text selection.
• 📐 Smart Auto-Spanning Toolbar: Dynamically expands and balances toolbar keys symmetrically to prevent awkward gaps across portrait, landscape, and tablet widths.
• 🧭 Dedicated Text Editing Panel: Gboard-style precision DPAD arrow navigation, selection mode (Shift + arrows), select word, select all, and editing shortcuts.
• 🖱️ Touchpad Mode: Swipe up on the spacebar to control the cursor freely across the screen, including full-screen laptop-style touchpad mode.
• 🪟 Native IME Floating Window: Seamless native IME window architecture with zero sensitive permissions (no SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW), pass-through background touches, bottom control bar (close, center-drag pill, resize drag handle), multi-touch tracking, zero dead space, and persistent mode memory.
• 🪟 Auto Floating Keyboard in Landscape: Automatically switches to a compact moveable floating window when entering landscape orientation and restores full docked width in portrait.
• 🖼️ Live System Wallpaper & FastBlurEngine: Dynamic blurred home/lock screen wallpaper background beneath keys with adjustable blur intensity slider and adaptive contrast.
• ⚙️ Per-App Profiles & Compatibility Engine: Tailor keyboard behavior per application (Settings → Plugins & Capabilities → App Profiles): enable web editor compatibility, automatic incognito, force non-incognito, direct commit mode, symbol composing (preserving underscores _ in Tasker variables), dialer search field compatibility (TYPE_NULL), and custom Enter action overrides.
• ⌨️ First-Class Hardware Keyboard Support: Full predictive text, auto-correction, candidate selection shortcuts (1, 2, 3), and D-PAD navigation in emoji palettes for external Bluetooth/USB keyboards, with smart toolbar elevation above the navigation bar.
• 🎨 Advanced Appearance & Key Ergonomics: Independent corner radius sliders for Normal Keys, Functional Keys (Shift/Backspace), and Action Keys (Enter/Space), adjustable key gaps, customizable padding scales, and distinct Shift/Caps visual state indicators (outline, filled, underlined).
• ⌨️ Dual Toolbar / Split Suggestions: Option to split suggestions from the quick-action toolbar.
• 🎨 Custom Layout Profiles: Save up to 5 custom layout profiles with persistent slot index tracking.
• ⌨️ Direct Switch Target IME & Custom Keycodes: Bind keycode -10076 to any toolbar key to switch directly to a specific target keyboard (e.g. Japanese, Korean, or Chinese IME). See the Comprehensive Keycodes & Actions Reference for the full keycodes catalog.

📋 Clipboard & Productivity

• 🎬 GIF Search & Media Picker: High-performance in-keyboard GIF and sticker media picker powered by GIPHY and KLIPY, with live animated preview, trending search, recent tray, and automatic WhatsApp sticker normalization (512x512 WebP).
• 📋 In-Keyboard Action Pill & Multi-Select Clipboard: Gboard-style compact floating action pill on long press (paste, pin, delete, share), multi-select batch deletion/pinning, and sensitive OTP/card data filtering.
• 🔢 Real-Time Inline Math Calculations: Automatically evaluates mathematical expressions upon typing = (e.g. 25*4=, 500-15%=, (12+8)/4=) and shows the answer directly in the suggestion strip for 1-tap replacement.
• 🔍 Smart Clipboard History & Inline Editing: Search clips in real-time, swipe right to edit text directly in the toolbar with full gesture cursor/deletion, swipe left to delete with 5s undo, and fold pinned items.
• 📸 Screenshot Suggestions: Detects recently taken screenshots and offers instant 1-tap sharing via the suggestion strip or clipboard history.
• 📝 Versatile Text Expander: Built-in shortcut expansion with dynamic variables (%date%, %time%, %clipboard%, %cursor%), composable modifier filters (%clipboard:clean%, :singleline, :title, :slug, :upper, :replace), and automatic Wikipedia / research paper citation cleaner.
• 💾 Storage & Cache Management: Visual disk space auditing across AI models, dictionaries, sound packs, and media cache, with 1-tap cache purging and history reset (Settings → Plugins → Storage & Cache).
• 🔐 Granular Backup & Encrypted API Key Export: Export preferences, layouts, custom wordlists, typing history, and text expander shortcuts separately, with optional AES-256 encrypted export for third-party AI and media API keys.
• 💾 Selective Category Backup & Restore: Export and restore your data modularly with independent category checkboxes (Layouts, Theme & Custom Backgrounds, Dictionaries & Typing History, Clipboard History, and General Settings) without all-or-nothing overwrites.
• 🔎 In-Palette Emoji Search: Search emojis instantly by name or keyword directly within the emoji palette view, powered by locale-aware emoji dictionaries.
• ✉️ Privacy-First OTP Auto-Fill: Notification-based OTP verification code detection without sensitive SMS permissions, with customizable messaging app selection.
• 📚 Smart Learning & Session Boost: Adaptive personal dictionary learning threshold (1 to 5 times) and dynamic session word boosting.
• 🚫 Blacklist & Regex Filtering: Filter offensive words or unwanted suggestions with custom regex pattern support.
• 🔄 Google Dictionary Import: Seamlessly import personal dictionary words exported from Gboard.
• 🔄 In-App Update Checker: Direct GitHub release checks with single-version changelogs and 1-tap “View Release” redirection (standard flavor).

📥 Download

🛠️ Setup Guide

1. Cloud & Self-Hosted AI Setup (Gemini / Groq / OpenAI / Ollama)

1. Cloud API: Obtain an API key from Google AI Studio or Groq Console.
2. Self-Hosted AI: Run Ollama, LM Studio, or LocalAI on your local network (e.g. http://192.168.1.100:11434/v1).
3. Open Settings → AI Integration → Set AI Provider.
4. Select your provider (or choose Custom (OpenAI-compatible) for self-hosted instances), enter your endpoint URL/token, and choose your preferred model and target language.
5. 👉 Read the Full AI & Prompts Guide

2. Voice Input Setup (On-Device Whisper AI)

1. Download and install the LeanType Voice Plugin APK on your Android device (installed as a background IPC service).
2. Grant Microphone permission to the LeanType Voice Plugin.
3. In LeanType, open Settings → Voice typing (or Settings → Plugins → Voice) and tap Whisper Speech Models.
4. Download or import your preferred Whisper model (e.g. Base ~74 MB recommended).
5. Tap the microphone icon on the keyboard toolbar to start speech-to-text!

3. Translation Setup (Offline & Online)

1. Online Flavor (Standard): Open Settings → Translation and tap Download Plugin to install the LeanType Translation Plugin automatically.
2. Offline Flavor (Offline): Download translation_plugin-arm64-v8a.apk from GitHub Releases and load it in Settings → Plugins → Translation.
3. Download or import your required language translation models (~30 MB per language).
4. Tap the Translate icon on the keyboard toolbar to translate selected text or input fields instantly.

4. Handwriting Recognition Setup

1. Online Flavor (Standard): Open Settings → Handwriting and tap Download Plugin to fetch the LeanType Handwriting Plugin.
2. Offline Flavor (Offline): Download handwriting_plugin-arm64-v8a.apk from GitHub Releases and load it in Settings → Plugins → Handwriting.
3. Download or import handwriting recognition models for your languages.
4. Tap the Handwriting key on the toolbar or long-press spacebar to draw characters on the writing canvas.

5. Offline AI Setup (Local GGUF Models)

1. Download ai_plugin-arm64-v8a.apk (or ai_plugin-x86_64.apk) from the LeanType Offline AI Plugin Releases.
2. In LeanType (offline build), navigate to Settings → Plugins → Offline AI and tap Load Offline AI plugin to load the .apk.
3. Download a compatible GGUF model (e.g. Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf or Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf).
4. In LeanType, navigate to Settings → Advanced → GGUF Model (.gguf) and select the model file from storage.

6. Dictionaries & Gesture Typing Setup

1. Dictionaries: With unbundled dictionaries in v4.1.6, open Settings → Dictionaries (or tap the dictionary icon on the toolbar when missing) to download or import your language dictionary (.dict).
2. Gesture Typing: In online builds, open Settings → Gesture typing to download the gesture library automatically. In offline builds, download the library and load via Settings → Gesture typing → Load gesture library.

7. Offline Camera & Screenshot OCR Setup

1. Online Flavors: Open Settings → OCR & Text Extraction (or Settings → Plugins → OCR) and tap Download Plugin to install the LeanType OCR Plugin.
2. Offline Flavors: Download ocr_plugin.apk from GitHub Releases and load it in Settings → Plugins → OCR.
3. Tap the Camera / OCR icon on the toolbar to open the in-keyboard scanner or take a screenshot to see the instant suggestion pill.

8. GIF Search & Media Picker Setup

1. Open Settings → Plugins → GIF Settings (or tap the GIF key on the toolbar).
2. Select your preferred provider (GIPHY or KLIPY). Optionally configure custom API keys.
3. Search trending GIFs, browse stickers, or insert media directly into compatible messaging apps.

9. CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) Setup

1. Open Settings → Languages → Add language and select Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
2. In Settings → Plugins → CJK Settings, enable the CJK Engine (or install the companion plugin if prompted).
3. Select your input style (e.g. Pinyin for Chinese, Flick/Romaji for Japanese, 2-Set Hangul for Korean) and type with the live candidate strip.

🧩 Ecosystem & Plugins

Expand LeanType with official companion plugins:

📱 More Android Projects by LeanBitLab

Discover our complete suite of privacy-first, open-source Android applications and utilities:
👉 Explore All LeanBitLab Android Projects

🤝 Community & Contributing

• Bug Reports & Feature Requests: Open a GitHub Issue
• Discussion & Support: GitHub Discussions
• Official Telegram Channel: @LeanBitLab
• Theme Creators: Tag your repository with leantype-theme to appear in our theme catalog.

💖 Support the Project

Building and maintaining privacy-first, on-device AI and keyboard technologies requires continuous hardware testing, compute for model optimization, and development time.

If LeanType improves your daily typing workflow, please consider sponsoring our work!

  

📜 Credits & Acknowledgments

• HeliBoard by Helium314: the foundational keyboard project
• OpenBoard & AOSP LatinIME
• llama.cpp & llamacpp-kotlin: on-device local LLM execution
• whisper.cpp: on-device speech recognition
• All contributors and open-source supporters!

⚖️ License

LeanType is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0).
See the LICENSE file for details.