[Feature Request] Custom Layouts: Custom Layers

[ShaKabosh]

Description

In Unexpected Keyboard, there is seemingly this concept of "layers", where you have a text layer, numeric layer, emoji, greekmath, and clipboard layer. It would be extremely useful for more complex keyboard layouts, if custom "layerAs" could be defined in the XML format, or preexisting layers could be modified for that specific layout.

How this could look

To maintain compatability with the current spec, a new tag, layer could be created and placed inside the main keyboard tag. Then, a new complex key type (perhaps layer?) could be used to switch between custom layers. An example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<keyboard name="Example">
    ...
    <row>
        ...
        <key c=":layer symbol='&#x2461;':secondary"/>
        ...
    </row>
    ...
    <layer name="secondary">
        ...
        <row>
            ...
            <key c="switch_text"/>
            ...
        </row>
        ...
    </layer>
    ...
</keyboard>

[Julow]

Thanks for your issue. This was also suggested in https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/issues/678 and was one of the inspirations for the "complex" key thing. I hope this could also help implement custom numpads as this was asked a few times (https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/issues/459, https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/issues/808).

Would you be interested in implementing this ?

[michele-bs]

This would be really powerful. I'd really like to be able to create/customise my own layers.