Proxy Utilities

Overview

iOS keyboards use a UITextDocumentProxy to integrate with the currently active text field. It lets you insert and delete text, get the selected text, move the input cursor, etc.

The native proxy APIs are however quite limited, and make it hard to get detailed information about the text and perform many standard keyboard operations.

KeyboardKit therefore extends the proxy with more capabilities. KeyboardInputViewController also has a custom .textDocumentProxy that lets you do even more.

KeyboardKit Pro adds even more proxy capabilities, such as being able to read the full document, instead of the limited text you get access to by default.

Mamespace

KeyboardKit has a Proxy namespace with proxy-related types. It currently only contains utils when it’s part of a KeyboardKit Pro build.

Extensions

KeyboardKit extends the native UITextDocumentProxy with additional capabilities, such as the ability to get more content from the document, analyze words & sentences, end the current sentence, etc.

Here are some examples of extensions that KeyboardKit adds to it:

currentWord
deleteBackward(range:)
deleteBackward(times:)
documentContext
endSentence(withText:)
fullDocumentContext(config:)
hasUnclosedQuotationBeforeInput(for:)
isCursorAtNewSentence
isCursorAtNewWord
isCursorAtTheEndOfTheCurrentWord
isReadingFullDocumentContext
replaceCurrentWord(with:)
sentenceBeforeInput
sentenceDelimiters
wordBeforeInput
wordDelimiters

See the documentation for more information and a complete list of extension.

👑 KeyboardKit Pro

KeyboardKit Pro unlocks additional text document proxy capabilities, like the ability to read the full document context, instead of the limited text you get access to by default.

Full Document Context

Apple’s native text document proxy doesn’t return all the text within the document. It instead cuts off the available text at any time, e.g. at the previous or next paragraph.

KeyboardKit Pro therefore lets you read all text from the proxy, using a proxy extension that reads the full document content by moving the input cursor in intricate ways:

let proxy = keyboardContext.textDocumentProxy
let result = try await proxy.fullDocumentContext(config: ...)

Note that this is a best effort operation that isn’t guaranteed to return a complete result. You can therefore configure the function to yield better results.

Documentation

The information on this page is shortened to be easier to overview. For more information see the online documentation, or the KeyboardKit Pro documentation.