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Customization
Besides "normal" settings, HeliBoard allows for more advanced customization in some areas, for which you find information on this page.
You can set a user-defined theme, for day and night themes separately. Once the user-defined theme is enabled, an "adjust colors" item will appear, which takes you to another screen. The items show the color to be used on the left, and the switch on the right indicates whether the color is determined automatically (off) or set manually (on). Switching the switch off when you have set a custom color switches to automatic color, but does not delete the custom color (just enable the switch again).
When clicking the color or the text, a color selector opens in which you can set whatever color and transparency (the bottom slider) you like. Adjusting transparency is disabled for "keyboard background". The text field allows entering a hexadecimal RGB color (without the leading #).
In the "..." menu on top right, you can show additional colors for more fine-grained adjustments, or you can show all colors that are used internally. The latter option shows a lot of colors, and is meant specifically for users who want a lot of control, even if it's at the cost of convenience. The starting color for each entry is random, just based on the name of the color (so you can tell the colors apart), and there is no option to set a reasonably usable color automatically. Since the colors correspond to what is used internally, the list of colors might change due to adding or removing colors during development.
The "..." menu also offers saving the current selection of colors to a file, or to clipboard, so you can do a backup or share your theme. The load option allows loading such data. Colors are saved in a format that allows loading to both day and night themes.
On the bottom you have a text field that serves no purpose but to preview the current theme.
Note: if you're using dynamic colors (available only for Android 12+), you don't need to activate the “Auto day/night mode” setting for keyboard colors to follow your device's day/night mode, unless you want to use different background images.
You can customize all keyboard layouts available in the app.
For the main layout, you can do this in languages & layouts, when use system languages is disabled. Then tap on a language and select the + next to "layout" and click "add custom layout". Then you can either load a layout from a file, or copy an existing layout. Once you have the new layout, tap to edit it.
Simple layouts are mostly straightforward to edit, but the more powerful and customizable Json format may be cumbersome to work with, especially when you just use the internal text box editor.
Other layouts are available in advanced settings, and can be edited the same way (but not loaded from files directly).
You'll find plenty of explanations in this wiki, here.
You can add custom dictionaries, or replace a built-in "main" dictionary. Adding is done in languages & layouts by tapping the + next to dictionaries. Alternatively you can open a .dict file in a file explorer with HeliBoard and choose the language.
Each dictionary has a type, which is unique per language. So when the dictionary has type "main", it will replace any existing main dictionary for that language.
Creating dictionaries is a somewhat complex process, you can find information in the readme at https://codeberg.org/Helium314/aosp-dictionaries. In the same repository you can also find more dictionaries gathered from various sources.
You can adjust the normal and long-press key codes of toolbar keys to your liking. Key codes are Unicode code points. There are also some special key codes, but you will need to consider that not all of them are implemented. See here for which of the special codes are allowed for use.