Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Jump to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Matthew Paul Thomas
on 27 May 2010

The keyboard menu


Quite often, designers work on a design for something they’re unlikely to use themselves. This is a situation I’ve found myself in the past few weeks, designing a new keyboard menu for Ubuntu.

This menu will replace both the keyboard layout toggle from Ubuntu’s doomed notification area, and the IBus menu for choosing a keyboard input method. I use just one keyboard layout myself, but switching layouts is important for millions of multilingual users. And input methods are important for typing characters in languages that have hundreds or thousands of characters, such as Chinese and Korean.

Keyboard layouts and input methods are highly related things, so showing them in the same menu is long overdue. It would be great if we could also merge the Keyboard Preferences window with the IBus Preferences window; Canonical engineers don’t have time for that in the near future, but I’d be happy to work on a design with anyone who is interested.

At UDS earlier this month we discussed the new menu. We’d also like your feedback on the full specification, especially if you use input methods or multiple keyboard layouts.

Related posts


Bartek Szopka
18 July 2023

Vanilla 4.0 release

Design Article

Last week we released a new major version of the Vanilla framework. Vanilla 4.0 introduces the elements of the new style used for a current rebranding of Canonical’s brochure websites, including typography changes of headings utilising new variable Ubuntu font, wider grid width, removed rounded corners, some updated colours, and updates t ...


Goulin Khoge
14 October 2022

Introducing a VSCode extension for Vanilla CSS Framework

Ubuntu Article

The Vanilla CSS Framework is a utility class-based and customizable SASS library that is the go-to when it comes to styling websites and dashboards across the majority of projects at Canonical. Knowing all the class utilities could be tricky. That’s why we make sure that our documentation is up-to-date and accessible as much as possible. ...


toto
11 October 2022

Design and Web team summary – 23 September 2022

Ubuntu Article

The Web and design team at Canonical runs in two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration. During this iteration, the team met in London for a team workshop. It was the first time a lot ...