Properly responding integrating with the software keyboard is a big part of building a solid iOS app. Traditionally, this would involve observing NSNotificationCenter notifications and some pretty lengthy boilerplate code. Today we'll look at a great little library from Toto Tvalavadze called Typist that can improve all this. Let's check it out.

Typist works by exposing a way for us to easily "opt-in" to certain keyboard events:

Typist . shared . on ( event : . didShow ) { ( options ) in // TODO } . start () }

Yep. That's it. Gone are the wildly verbose notifications and complicated setup.

(Note: We're not required to use Typist's singleton instance, but it's provided for convenience).

Typist provides this same interface for a bunch of useful events:

Typist . shared . on ( event : . willShow ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . on ( event : . didShow ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . on ( event : . willHide ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . on ( event : . didHide ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . on ( event : . willChangeFrame ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . on ( event : . didChangeFrame ) { _ in /* TODO */ } . start () }

Finally, inside each event closure, we're given a Typist.KeyboardOptions type that contains strongly-typed properties describing the event:

Typist . shared . on ( event : . willShow ) { ( options ) in guard options . belongsToCurrentApp else { return } updateLayout ( for : options . endFrame ) } . on ( event : . willHide ) { ( options ) in guard options . belongsToCurrentApp else { return } updateLayout ( for : options . endFrame ) } . start () }

Here we're guard -ing to make sure the keyboard belongs to our app, and returning early if not.

Then, we use the endFrame property to adjust our own views to accomodate the keyboard.

Neat!

Typist's options type also provides startFrame , animationCurve , and animationDuration properties to help us match our app's animation to the keyboard's.

Learn more about Typist at http://git.io/typist