microsoft / microsoft/PowerToys

Visual keyboard for users whose physical keyboard lacks language-specific letters

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#48,558 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Needs-Team-Response Needs-Triage Product-Keyboard Manager
Dominant language
C
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Forks
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Description

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Please add a visual keyboard feature to PowerToys that lets users click or insert characters that do not exist on their physical keyboard layout. This would help people who need to type in languages whose letters are missing from their keyboard, without relying only on memorized shortcuts or external tools.

The feature could provide an on-screen keyboard with support for multiple layouts and quick switching between languages. It would be especially useful as an accessibility and multilingual typing feature inside the PowerToys ecosystem.

Scenario when this would be used?

This would be useful when a user has a physical keyboard that does not contain the letters required for their language. For example, someone may need to type special Latin characters, accented letters, Arabic characters, or other language-specific symbols that are not printed on their keyboard.

It would also help users who work in more than one language, users learning a new language, and users who want a faster visual way to enter missing characters without changing hardware or searching online every time.

Supporting information
Suggested capabilities:

On-screen visual keyboard with clickable keys.

Support for multiple languages and keyboard layouts.

Fast switching between layouts.

Optional pinning or floating mode for quick access.

Good compatibility with existing keyboard-related PowerToys features.

This request is for character input and language accessibility, not only for displaying pressed keys on screen.

Fastest path
Open the PowerToys feature request form, paste the text above into each field, and submit it from GitHub. The page you have open is the issues list for the PowerToys repository.

Supporting information

No response

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue does not identify files, tests, or an existing entry point. Start by reviewing the PowerToys repository structure and existing keyboard-related utilities, then define the supported layouts, switching behavior, input mechanism, and completion criteria before implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
accessibility, desktop, internationalization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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