Use better on-screen keyboard

PNDeb / pinenote-debian-image

A user-ready linux image/rootfs for the Pine64 Pinenote based on Debian trixie and GNOME

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Use better on-screen keyboard #25

Open SomeoneToIgnore opened 1 year ago

SomeoneToIgnore commented 1 year ago

Landscape mode, current rootfs keyboard: linux_keyboard

Landscape mode, Android keyboard (top overlay with ESC, arrows and other symbols comes from termux, not the keyboard per se): android_keyboard

Current Gnome on-screen keyboard is very hard to use:

it's relatively slow to draw on e-ink (esp. the pressing animations) due to being very dark
there's plenty of ghosting on the keys
the distance between keys is very small, same as the keys themselves
the digits/special characters are relatively inconvenient to turn off: ?.. button is not on the edge of the keyboard as on almost every modern mobile keyboard
the digits/special characters are very inconvenient to input: the keyboard toggles back to letters after every digit/symbol input, so the default 1234 user password has to use 8 symbols that are relatively slow due to redrawing dark animations being slow

m-weigand commented 1 year ago

I agree, the keyboard is sometimes really unusable. However, I'm still not really sure what to do about it. I also think there are at least two onscreen-keyboard variants in gnome, with the new one being caribou, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/caribou. It says there "configurable", but I do not understand how to actually change anything at runtime...

m-weigand commented 1 year ago

The numbers-do-not-latch issue is tracked here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/5763

m-weigand commented 1 year ago

There exists an extension to improve the osk, but a rewrite for gnome 43 is still in progress, see: https://github.com/nick-shmyrev/improved-osk-gnome-ext/issues/30

Still, there apparently is a wip branch working on gnome 43

m-weigand commented 1 year ago

Not fully related, but for later reference: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6238

m-weigand commented 1 week ago

This was mentioned in the chat. We should revisit the options:

https://github.com/Vishram1123/gjs-osk (was recommended in a reddit post and seems to work in gnome 47)
https://github.com/maliit/keyboard (not sure how to activate this in Gnome)
https://github.com/nick-shmyrev/improved-osk-gnome-ext (as far as I can see, Gnome 47 is not supported)

WilsontheWolf commented 4 days ago

Figured I would play with some of these. I was able to install gjs-osk.You need to install the gnome-browser-connector package to install extensions from the site, and run gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation "true" to disable the version check. I found it was a bit small by default but I switched the layout to Tenkeyless Internation (Compact Internation also should work), and you can adjust the size in the settings to how you would like). It doesn't seem to push up apps like the gnome one does, but can be dragged around to work around that. I'll use it for a bit and see how it works.