Mini Keyboard: Remote Typing

Your Mac has no printed keys for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian or Hindi. Your iPhone does — and you already type on it all day. Mini Keyboard lets your Mac borrow it.

Type on your phone and the characters appear on your Mac as you type them. Not when you press Enter. Not after a Send button. Switch scripts mid-sentence the way you already do on your phone, and whatever your iPhone keyboard can produce, your Mac receives.

TYPING, IN ANY SCRIPT

• Characters travel as text rather than as key codes, so scripts that need an input method — Japanese, Chinese, Korean — arrive composed and correct, as you type them.
• Right-to-left scripts behave the way they do on your phone.
• Command, Control, Option and Shift chords, plus Tab, Esc, Return, Delete and the arrow keys. Shortcuts land as real shortcuts, resolved through the keyboard layout your Mac is actually set to, so Command-Q is where your layout puts it rather than where a US layout would.
• Emoji and dictation go across too. If your iPhone keyboard can produce it, your Mac receives it.

AND A TRACKPAD, RIGHT WHERE THE KEYS ARE

Pull it up over the keyboard when you need to put the caret somewhere before you can start typing. The trackpad is free, like the typing.

• Tap to click, with left and right buttons always on screen for when you would rather not tap.
• Two-finger scroll, and a two-finger tap for right-click.
• Tap-and-a-half to drag, plus a drag-lock toggle so a long drag does not have to be one stroke.
• A full-screen mode that turns the whole phone into travel.

It is there so the typing works without reaching over to the Mac. There are no volume or playback keys and nothing is mirrored to the phone — this is a keyboard, not a media remote.

YOUR OWN KEYS, ABOVE THE KEYBOARD (MINI KEYBOARD PRO)

A row of keys you define, sitting above the keyboard on your phone. Each one sends a keystroke or a piece of text to your Mac — nothing else, because that is all a key can do.

• Chords as a single tap: ⌘⇧4 for a screenshot, ⌘⌥Esc to force quit, ⌘⇥ to switch apps.
• Snippets you type often — an address, a sign-off, a shell command — in any script, multi-line.
• Presets for a numpad and for navigation keys, and pages, so a coding deck and a writing deck can both exist.

Six keys on one page are free. Mini Keyboard Pro removes the limits — unlimited keys and pages — and adds the presets. It is a single one-time purchase ($4.99 in the US store), never a subscription.

PAIRING TAKES ABOUT TEN SECONDS

Open the Mac app, point your phone at the QR code in its menu-bar popover, and you are paired. The code carries a 160-bit secret, the connection is encrypted, and the pairing is bound to that one Mac, so a code scanned on your machine cannot be replayed against someone else's. If you would rather not point a camera at your own screen, the same code can be typed instead.

PRIVATE BECAUSE THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO

Everything stays on your local Wi-Fi. No account, no sign-up, no server, no cloud. Nothing you type is stored, logged, or sent anywhere except the Mac you paired with. No ads, no subscription, no tracking. Typing and the trackpad are free forever; the only thing for sale is Mini Keyboard Pro, once.

TWO THINGS TO KNOW FIRST

1. You need the Mac half. Mini Keyboard for Mac is a separate free download on the Mac App Store. This app cannot type into a Mac without it.
2. Both devices have to be on the same Wi-Fi network. It does not work over the internet or over cellular — nothing is relayed through a server, because there is no server.

The Mac app also needs one permission. macOS files "send key presses" under Privacy & Security › Accessibility, which is a confusing place to find a keyboard. The Mac app asks for that permission, explains it in plain language the first time you open it, and uses it for nothing else. It does not read your screen and it does not record what you type.

Mini Keyboard first shipped in 2014. Version 2.0 is a complete rebuild.