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Pastiera

Feature Overview

Core typing

Pastiera is built for physical-keyboard Android devices and centers on hardware-key productivity:

  • configurable long press behavior
  • one-shot and lock states for Shift, Alt, Ctrl, and SYM
  • multi-tap for layouts that define alternative characters
  • optional smart typing helpers such as auto-capitalization and double-space period insertion

Pastiera is more than a keyboard. It also includes device-navigation tools:

  • Nav Mode for cursor and UI movement with letter keys
  • configurable Ctrl-based shortcuts
  • launcher shortcuts
  • power shortcuts that reuse launcher assignments outside the launcher
  • swipe-based cursor movement on the variation row

Layouts and language coverage

The app supports both built-in and custom configurations:

  • standard Latin layouts such as qwerty, azerty, and qwertz
  • language-specific layouts including Greek, Arabic, Ukrainian, Serbian Cyrillic, and Vietnamese Telex
  • import/export for JSON layouts
  • additional input styles through Languages and Maps

SYM, emoji, variations, and clipboard

Pastiera exposes several non-letter input surfaces:

  • reorderable SYM pages
  • emoji page and full emoji picker
  • symbols page
  • clipboard history page
  • configurable variation rows, including static utility rows
  • custom SYM and variation editing

Suggestions and dictionaries

The app currently includes:

  • experimental suggestion engine
  • auto substitutions
  • per-language configuration
  • shared global substitution rules via Pastiera recipes
  • user dictionary editing
  • optional keyboard-proximity and edit-type ranking

Device-specific extras

Some features depend on device capabilities or extra tools:

  • Titan 2 remains a long-standing baseline device
  • Q25 support is recent and should be treated as actively stabilizing
  • trackpad gesture suggestions require Shizuku
  • clipboard behavior can vary with Android or OEM restrictions

Data, backup, and updates

Pastiera includes maintenance features directly in the app:

  • ZIP backup and restore
  • layout and dictionary persistence
  • GitHub-based update checks in builds that support them
  • locale-aware UI translations

Current state

As of March 7, 2026, the app has broad feature coverage already, but some features are still marked by the upstream project as experimental or recently expanded:

  • suggestions are still described in-app and upstream as experimental
  • Q25 support is recent
  • some navigation and gesture workflows depend on device behavior or Shizuku
  • docs screenshots are still pending and tracked separately

What changed after 0.84 beta

The last stable major release on GitHub is v0.84beta, published on February 5, 2026. Since then, the app has mainly grown in these user-visible areas:

  • Vietnamese Telex input mode
  • emoji search in both emoji pickers, with offline locale data
  • German QWERTZ multi-tap layout with ä, ö, ü, and ß
  • Greek accented-vowel multi-tap improvements
  • Q25 device support and Key2 device profile work
  • more explicit accessibility controls for TalkBack-related behavior
  • stronger variation controls, including a global variation-layout override
  • improved SYM ordering and custom SYM character input

Read the detail pages for exact setup paths and limitations.