EFKey.app
Get
Help

Eight things worth knowing.

The questions that come in. Three or four steps each.

Add it and switch to it

iOS puts third-party keyboards behind two screens and most people never find the second one.

  1. Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard, and pick EFKey.
  2. Open any chat, hold the globe key and choose EFKey.
  3. Full Access is optional. Grant it if you want haptics or the tools, skip it if you don't.

Bring your words from SwiftKey

SwiftKey has no export button on iOS, so the words come out of its backup instead.

  1. Open OneDrive, where SwiftKey keeps the backup under your Microsoft account.
  2. Take the vocabulary.txt out of it.
  3. In EFKey: Settings, Dictionary, Import words, and pick that file.
  4. It only adds. Nothing already in your dictionary is replaced or deleted.

Type in two languages

This is the thing EFKey was built for, and once it's set you stop thinking about it.

  1. Settings, Typing, Language, and turn Multilingual on.
  2. Pick two. Both get corrected at the same time, in the middle of a sentence.
  3. Need more than two? Turn Multilingual off, set up to five, and hold 123 to move between them.

Set dictation up once

iOS won't let a keyboard start recording from the background, so the app arms the microphone first.

  1. Open the EFKey app once. That starts the session and the mic stays armed.
  2. In the keyboard: menu, Dictation, tap the mic and talk. The countdown is in the Dynamic Island.
  3. Add the apps you usually write from and the return button takes you back in one tap.
  4. After five quiet minutes the session lets the mic go, so the orange dot doesn't sit there all day.

Copy and paste from the keys

No hunting for the cursor with your finger.

  1. Hold C and pull down to copy. With nothing selected it takes the whole field.
  2. Hold P to paste, H to open the clipboard.
  3. Any gesture can move to another key, or switch off, in Settings, Function gestures.

Run the AI on your own machine

Translation, dictation and AI edits go on-device where Apple covers it. Where it doesn't, you choose.

  1. Settings, EF, API key, and pick a provider: Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI or Groq.
  2. Or change the address to Ollama at localhost:11434, or LM Studio at localhost:1234.
  3. Anything speaking the OpenAI-compatible protocol works, including your own proxy.
  4. The key lives in your Keychain. Nothing passes through a server of mine, because there isn't one.

Make it feel like yours

Almost everything about how it looks and behaves is a switch.

  1. Hold the comma key, or 123, and the settings open inside the keyboard.
  2. Keyboard, Appearance: height from 75 to 115 percent, wider keys, sounds, haptics.
  3. Keyboard, Keys: number row, comma, period, emoji key, long-press hints.
  4. Keyboard, Customize the toolbar: what's in the bar, in what order, and which side it opens from.

Stop iOS asking about every paste

Clipboard history can only be a history if it's allowed to read what you copy.

  1. Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, EFKey, Paste from Other Apps, Allow.
  2. On Ask, EFKey saves only what you paste, so it never sets off a storm of prompts.
  3. You can switch saving off completely in EFKey, Tools, Clipboard.

Back to the keyboard

Ready when you are.

One conversation is enough to tell.

Download on the App Store