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iOS Esperanto keyboard review: Ĝusta Klavaro Posted by on Jun 11, 2013 in Uncategorized

Ĝusta Klavaro for iPhone

Last night, I was enjoying watching Apple’s Keynote about their exciting, upcoming products, including the new design and features in their upcoming iOS 7 operating system (the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch). On the language side, it will even come with Dutch, Italian and Korean dictionaries as well as a Chinese-English bilingual dictionary.

I applaud Apple for continuing to add more language support to iOS. However, I receive and send a lot of emails in Esperanto. In addition to this, I often comment and post in social networks too. Unfortunately, this is not possible natively on my iPhone or iPad. However, I was happy one day to discover the app Ĝusta Klavaro.

Now, when I need to type something in Esperanto, I just run Ĝusta Klavaro and then cut and paste the text to where I need it. Despite the fact that I’d rather have a real Esperanto keyboard on my iPhone, ĜK provides the best solution I could imagine, since it’s not yet possible to type Esperanto characters on any standard iOS keyboard. Within the app, you are provided with an empty text field and below the usual touchscreen keyboard with an additional line of letters: ĈĜĤĴŜŬ ĉĝĥĵŝŭ.

iPad with physical keyboard

The app also disables autocorrect as you type, since Esperanto words aren’t in any default iOS dictionary. Another nice touch is that when you connect a Bluetooth keyboard, it is smart enough to recognize this and just add the special Esperanto keys to the bottom of the screen as you can see by the picture on the right.

I’m really hoping that Apple will add Esperanto keyboard support in iOS 7. I’d just like to see the characters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ on the touchscreen keyboard when holding down a letter as it already works for other characters like ö, ż, ū, etc. Since Esperanto speakers speak a wide variety of languages, it would be most useful to have such support on every system keyboard.

There is quite a lot of demand for this within the Esperanto community, since the app has been downloaded over 4,500 times. In any case, I really hope to see Esperanto input support on the next version of iOS! Just curious, how do you type Esperanto characters on your system?

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About the Author: Chuck Smith

I was born in the US, but Esperanto has led me all over the world. I started teaching myself Esperanto on a whim in 2001, not knowing how it would change my life. The timing couldn’t have been better; around that same time I discovered Wikipedia in it’s very early stages and launched the Esperanto version. When I decided to backpack through Europe, I found Esperanto speakers to host me. These connections led me to the Esperanto Youth Organization in Rotterdam, where I worked for a year, using Esperanto as my primary language. Though in recent years I’ve moved on to other endeavors like iOS development, I remain deeply engrained in the Esperanto community, and love keeping you informed of the latest news. The best thing that came from learning Esperanto has been the opportunity to connect with fellow speakers around the globe, so feel free to join in the conversation with a comment! I am now the founder and CTO of the social app Amikumu.

Comments:

  1. Giridhar Rao:

    On my android phone, AnySoftKeyboard supports Esperanto, and that works fine (although I’d like SwiftKey to be able to do that — its predictive features are better).

  2. Paŭl Peeraerts:

    Mi jam de pli ol jaro kontente uzas la programeton “Ĝusta klavaro”. Vi menciis, ke ne ekzistas Esperanto-literumilo por iOS. Prave, sed oni povas krei ĝin! Elektu la klavaron de lingvo, kiun vi ne uzas (mi elektis la polan) kaj tajpu ĉiam en Esperanto kiam tiu klavaro estas ŝaltita. Iom post iom iOS lernos la esperantajn vortojn kaj ne plu proponos la vortojn de la originala lingvo. Se mi tajpas “ciam” la (pola) literumilo aŭtomate korektas tion al “ĉiam”. Mi nun do uzas la programeton “Ĝusta klavaro” malpli kaj malpli, ĉar mia iOS jam iomete parolas Esperanton!

  3. James:

    Mi ofte uzas ĝin.

  4. D Murray:

    I have been using this on an iPad for some while, but it it now doesn’t work with iOS11.0.1 !!!